Tag Archive: Bonds

Consumer Prices And The Historical Pain(s)

2022-03-12

by

2022-03-12

The 1947-48 experience was truly painful, maybe even terrifying. The US and Europe had just come out of a decade when the worst deflationary consequences were so widespread that the period immediately following quickly erupted into the worst conflagration in human history.

Read More »

So Much Fragile *Cannot* Be Random Deflationary Coincidences

2022-03-10

by

2022-03-10

At first glance, or first exposure to this, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why all these so many pieces could be related. Outwardly, from the mainstream perspective, anyway, you’d think them random, and even if somehow correlated they’re supposed to be in the opposite way from what’s happened.

Read More »

Weekly Market Pulse: Oil Shock

2022-03-08

by

2022-03-08

Crude oil prices rose over 25% last week and as I sit down to write this evening the overnight futures are up another 8% to around $125. Almost every other commodity on the planet rose in prices last week too, as did the dollar. Those two factors – rising dollar and rising commodity prices – mean the likelihood of recession in the coming year has risen significantly in just the last week.

Read More »

Houston, We Have An Oil (and inventory) Problem

2022-03-07

by

2022-03-07

If only, like in the aftermath of the Apollo 13 explosion, we could just radio Houston to get started in figuring out just the way out of our fix. Mission Control would certainly buzz all the right people with the right stuff, summoning the best engineers and scientists from their quiet divans to the frenzied and dangerous work ahead.

Read More »

SWIFT Isn’t The ‘Nuclear Option’ For Russia, Because Russia can sell the dollars elsewhere and NOT via Swift

2022-03-01

by

2022-03-01

As everyone “knows”, the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency which can only leave the US government in control of it. Participation is both required and at the pleasure of American authorities. If you don’t accept their terms, you risk the death penalty: exile from the privilege of the US dollar’s essential business.From what little most people know about that essential business, it seems like it has something to do with that thing called...

Read More »

The Red Warning

2022-02-24

by

2022-02-24

Now it’s the Russian’s fault. Belligerence surrounding Donbas and Ukraine, raw materials and energy supplies to Europe threatened by Putin’s coiled bear. Why wouldn’t markets grow worried?There’s always a reason why we shouldn’t take these things seriously, or quickly dismiss them out of hand as the temporary product of whichever political fear-of-the-day.

Read More »

Weekly Market Pulse: Are We There Yet?

2022-01-31

by

2022-01-31

I’ll just get this out of the way right at the beginning. The question in the title of this post refers to the end of the ongoing stock market correction and the answer is likely no. There are no sure things in this business so it isn’t an unequivocal no, but based on history, the odds favor more weakness.

Read More »

FOMC Goes With Unemployment Rate While This Huge Number Happens To Far More Relevant Economic Data

2022-01-29

by

2022-01-29

The first time I can consciously remember using the term landmine was probably here in February 2019. I had described the same process play out several times before, I had just never applied that term. There was all sorts of market chaos in the final two months of 2018, including a full-on stock market correction, believe it or not, leaving the inflation and recovery narrative in near complete tatters.

Read More »

After Today’s FOMC, Yield Curve Is Already As Flat As It Was In Mar ’18 **Without A Single Rate Hike Yet**

2022-01-28

by

2022-01-28

It’s not hard to reason why there continues to be this conflict of interest (rates). On the one hand, impacting the short end of the yield curve, the unemployment rate has taken a tight grip on the FOMC’s limited imagination. The rate hikes are coming and the markets like all mainstream commentary agree that as it stands there’s nothing on the horizon to stop Jay Powell’s hawkishness.

Read More »

The Hawks Circle Here, The Doves Win There

2022-01-26

by

2022-01-26

We’ve been here before, near exactly here. On this side of the Pacific Ocean, in the US particularly the situation was said to be just grand. The economy was responding nicely to QE’s 3 and 4 (yes, there were four of them by that point), Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had said in the middle of 2013 it was becoming more than enough, creating for him and the FOMC coveted breathing space so as to begin tapering both of those ongoing programs.A...

Read More »

Weekly Market Pulse: Fear Makes A Comeback

2022-01-24

by

2022-01-24

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

Read More »

Good Time To Go Fish(er)ing Around The Yield Curve

2022-01-21

by

2022-01-21

It should be as simple as it sounds. Lower LT UST yields, less growth and inflation. Thus, higher LT UST yields, more growth and inflation. Right? If nominal levels are all there is to it, then simplicity rules the interpretation. Visiting with George Gammon last week, he confessed to committing this sin of omission.

Read More »

Weekly Market Pulse: A Very Contrarian View

2022-01-19

by

2022-01-19

What is the consensus about the economy today? Will 2022 growth be better or worse than 2021? Actually, that probably isn’t the right question because the economy slowed significantly in the second half of 2021. The real question is whether growth will improve from that reduced pace.

Read More »

US CPI Reaches Seven On US Goods Prices, With Disinflation Setting In Everywhere Else (incl. US Services)

2022-01-16

by

2022-01-16

How is that US Treasury rates out in the independent longer end of the yield curve have now “suffered” a seven percent CPI to go along with double taper and triple maybe quadruple (if the whispers are to be believed) rate hikes this year, yet have weathered all of that allegedly bond-busting brutality with barely a market fluctuation?

Read More »

China’s Petroyuan, Uncle Sam’s Checkbook, The Fed’s Bank Reserves: Who Really Sits On King Dollar’s Throne? (trick question)

2022-01-14

by

2022-01-14

A full part of the inflation hysteria, the first one, was the dollar’s looming crash. The currency was, too many claimed, on the verge of collapse by late 2017, heading downward and besieged on multiple fronts by economics and politics alike.

Read More »

Sentiment v. Substance: Checking In On Collateral Via, Yes, The Fed

2022-01-13

by

2022-01-13

The Federal Reserve, like other central banks around the world, it does lend out the securities it owns and holds. Sophisticated modern wholesale money markets are highly collateralized, so much so that collateral itself takes on the properties of currency.

Read More »

Conflict Of Interest (rates): 10-year Treasury Yield Highest in Almost Two Years

2022-01-12

by

2022-01-12

The dollar was high and going higher. Emerging markets had been seriously complaining. In one, the top central banker for India outright warned, “dollar funding has evaporated.” The TIC data supported his view, with full-blown negative months, net selling from afar that’s historically akin to what was coming out of India and the rest of the world.

Read More »

Taper Discretion Means Not Loving Payrolls Anymore

2022-01-10

by

2022-01-10

When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money.The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it was again his topic in California early Autumn ’97.

Read More »

As The Fed Tapers: What If More Rapid (published) Wage Increases Are Actually Evidence of *Deflationary* Conditions?

2022-01-05

by

2022-01-05

Since the Federal Reserve is not in the money business, their recent hawkish shift toward an increasingly anti-inflationary stance is a twisted and convoluted case of subjective interpretation.

Read More »

Taper Rejection: Mao Back On China’s Front Page

2021-12-29

by

2021-12-29

Chinese run media, the Global Times, blatantly tweeted an homage to China’s late leader Mao Zedong commemorating his 128th birthday. Fully understanding the storm of controversy this would create, with the Communist government’s full approval, such a provocation has been taken in the West as if just one more chess piece played in its geopolitical game against the United States in particular.No. The Communists really mean it. Mao’s their guy again....

Read More »