Tag Archive: Bonds
Weekly Market Pulse: No News Is…
Nothing happened last week. Stocks and bonds and commodities continued to trade and move around in price but there was no news to which those movements could be attributed. The economic news was a trifle and what there was told us exactly nothing new about the economy.
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Weekly Market Pulse: The More Things Change…
I stopped in a local antique shop over the weekend. The owner is retiring and trying to clear out as much as she can before they close the doors so I paid a mere $3 for the Life magazine above. I think it might be worth many multiples of that price for investors who think our situation today is somehow uniquely bad. The cover headline could just as easily be describing today as 1970.
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Weekly Market Pulse (VIDEO)
Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun compares the similarities between today’s bear market and past ones, plus last week’s data on the economy, employment, and whether the new data points to recession.
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Weekly Market Pulse: The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Sherlock Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
From Silver Blaze by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892
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Weekly Market Pulse: Same As It Ever Was
History never repeats itself. Man always does. Mark Twain is credited with a similar saying, that history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. Of course, there is scant evidence that Clemens said anything of the sort just as Voltaire may or may not have penned the quote above. But both men were much wittier than I – than most – so I’ll take them both as being representative if not genuine.
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Weekly Market Pulse: Opposite George
It all became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I’ve ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat… It’s all been wrong.
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Weekly Market Pulse: There Is No Certainty In Investing
Investors crave certainty. They want to know that there are definitive signals for them to follow as they adjust their investments to fit the current market and economy. They want to know that A leads to B leads to C. Tea leaf readers are always in high demand on Wall Street and they continue to find employment despite their almost universally dismal track record.
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Weekly Market Pulse: A Most Unusual Economy
The employment report released last Friday was better than expected but the response by bulls and bears alike was exactly as expected. Both found things in the report to support their preconceived notions about the state of the economy.
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Weekly Market Pulse: Things That Need To Happen
Perspective is something that comes with age I think. Certainly, as I’ve gotten older, my perspective on things has changed considerably. As we age, we tend to see things from a longer-term view.
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Getting Whipped Will Really Hurt
The Federal Reserve’s various branches don’t just do manufacturing surveys anymore. This is a modern economy, after all, meaning industry isn’t the same top dog as what it used to be. While still important, and still able to tear down even the global-iest synchronized of growth-y, services are the big macro enchilada.
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Eurodollar Futures Interpretation Is Everywhere
Consumer confidence in Germany never really picked up all that much last year. Conflating CPIs with economic condition, this divergence proved too big of a mystery. When the German GfK, for example, perked up only a tiny bit around September and October 2021, the color of consumer prices clouded judgement and interpretation of what had always been a damning situation.
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Weekly Market Pulse: Expand Your Horizons
Late last year I wrote a weekly update that focused on the speculative nature of the markets. In that article, I focused on the S&P 500 because I wanted to make a point, namely that owning the S&P 500 did not absolve investment advisers of their fiduciary duty.
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The Biggest Risk, No Surprise, Collateral
It’s not just the 4-week T-bill rate which is defying the Fed’s illusion of control, though that’s where the incidents are most evident. The front bill is nowhere close to the official RRP “floor” which can only mean one thing: collateral shortage, a large and persistent liquidity premium.
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Nasty Number Five, Not Hawk Hiking CBs
It’s not recession fears, those are in the past. For much if not most (vast majority) of mainstream pundits and newsmedia alike, unlike regular folks this is all news to them (the irony, huh?) Economists and central bankers everywhere had said last year was a boom, a true inflationary inferno raging worldwide.
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The Everything Data’s (Z1) Verdict: Not Inflation, Only More Of The Same
The only thing that changed was the CPI. What distinguishes 2021-22 from the prior post-crisis period 2007-20 is merely the performance of whatever consumer price index. This latter has been called inflation, yet the data conclusively support the market verdict pricing how it never was.What data?
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Market Pulse: Mid-Year Update
Note: This update is longer than usual but I felt a comprehensive review was necessary. The Federal Reserve panicked last week and spooked investors into the worst week for stocks since the onset of COVID in March 2020. The S&P 500 is now firmly in bear market territory but that is a fraction of the pain in stocks and other risky assets.
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Everything Hitting The Global (eurodollar) Wall
Over the weekend, Bitcoin tumbled again. Reaching an ultra-ugly low of $17,641 (before retracing back above $20k), even the self-styled premier digital “store of value” has thrown in the towel. As I wrote last week, winter isn’t coming it is here.
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Angry April TIC Zeroed In On China’s CNY and Japan’s JPY
If the March gasoline/oil spike hit a weak global economy really hard and caused what more and more looks like a recessionary shock, a(n un)healthy part of it was the acceleration of Euro$ #5 concurrently rippling through the global reserve system.
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Sorry Chairman Powell, Even FRBNY Now Has To Forecast Serious and Seriously Rising Recession Risk
At his last press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell made a bunch of unsubstantiated claims, none of which were called out or even questioned by the assembled reporters. These rituals are designed to project authority not conduct inquiry, and this one was perhaps the best representation of that intent. Powell’s job is to put the current predicament in the best possible light, starting by downplaying the current predicament.
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Curve Inversion 101: US CPI Politics Up Front, China PPI Down(ing) The Back
While the world fixated on the US CPI, it was other “inflation” data from across the Pacific that is telling the real economic story. Having conflated the former with a red-hot economy, the fact American consumer prices aren’t tied to the actual economic situation has been lost in the shuffle of the FOMC’s hawkishness, with markets obliged to price wrong-way Jay.
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