Tag Archive: Featured

Eugene Fama’s Efficient View of Stimulus Porn

2020-08-13

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2020-08-13

The Real GDP Problem, 1988-2018
The key word in the whole thing is “bias.” For a very long time, people working in and around the finance industry have sought to gain tremendous advantages. No explanation for the motive is required. Charts, waves, technical (sounding) analysis and so on.

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Kamala Harris Is Basically Obama-Clinton 2.0, but Worse

2020-08-13

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2020-08-13

No doubt, many of Harris's detractors will call her radical or a tool of the far left. The reality is actually far more alarming.

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Perfect Storm for Precious Metals Leads to Price Correction

2020-08-13

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2020-08-13

Gold Price Chart
Gold fell by nearly 6% yesterday and silver by a whopping 15%, the largest one day loss in over 7 years. The futures market saw massive volumes of selling with over 1.6 bn ounces of silver contracts sold yesterday. That’s a value of over $40 billion.

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FX Daily, August 12: Dollar was Sold in Asia and Europe, but is Poised to Bounce in North America

2020-08-12

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2020-08-12

The biggest rise in the US 10-year yield in a couple of months, as the record quarterly refunding, got underway may have helped stabilize the dollar after an earlier decline. The S&P 500 threatened to extend its advance for the eighth consecutive session yesterday, but a late sell-off stopped it cold after scaling to new five-month highs.

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Silver Supply & Demand Still Strong at $29, 11 Aug

2020-08-12

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2020-08-12

Silver Basis, Silver Price, 10 August
And, *bam!* Just like that, silver sells for $29. It seems so simple, so obvious, so black-and-white. Seeing the price chart in recent weeks, you wouldn’t know that silver speculators have been waiting for this moment since March, 2013 (when silver crossed the $29 line to the downside, and has not looked back until now).

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Dollar Softens, Equities Rise as Markets Ignore the Negatives

2020-08-12

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2020-08-12

Real Yields and Gold, 2018-2020
Markets seem to be increasingly desensitized to the usual negative drivers; the dollar is under pressure again. Stimulus talks remain stalled; reports suggest Trump is mulling a capital gains tax cut of some sort. US data highlight today will be July PPI; US Treasury begins its record $112 bln quarterly refunding.

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Science of Sentiment: Zooming Expectations Wonder

2020-08-12

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2020-08-12

It had been an unusually heated gathering, one marked by temper tantrums and often publicly expressed rancor. Slamming tables, undiplomatic rudeness. Europe’s leaders had been brought together by the uncomfortable even dangerous fact that the economic dislocation they’ve put their countries through is going to sustain enormously negative pressures all throughout them. What would a “united” European system do to try and fill in this massive hole?The...

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FX Daily, August 11: Gold and the Dollar are Sold while Stocks March Higher

2020-08-11

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2020-08-11

A rotation of sorts seems to be unfolding. The euro posted its second back-to-back loss in over a month. The Canadian dollar, which has been an under-performer among the major currencies for the past six weeks, gained, while most fell. 

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Traditional working model hampers Swiss women’s careers

2020-08-11

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2020-08-11

Swiss women are losing out when it comes to achieving managerial positions compared to their male colleagues and female peers from other countries. The common Swiss working model of women taking over childcare and men working full-time makes it harder for Swiss mothers to climb up the career ladder.

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The Dollar Is Dying

2020-08-11

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2020-08-11

Insulting the Captive Audience. This week, while perusing the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet figures, we came across a rather curious note.  We don’t know how long the Fed’s had this note posted to its website.  But we can’t recall ever seeing it.

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SPECIAL REPORT: Follow The Money – Volume 5

2020-08-11

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2020-08-11

If the recession was the first “shoe to drop”, what’s the second…or third? The shock of the self-inflicted COVID recession is behind us. What we’re all wondering now is what comes next? Will the economy recover to its previous state? Something better? Something worse? That will be determined by the second and third-order effects and they are already starting.

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A Second JOLTS

2020-08-11

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2020-08-11

What happens when we are stunned and dazed? We filter out the noise to focus on the bare basics by getting back to our instincts, acting reflexively based upon our deeply held beliefs and especially training. When faced with a crisis and there’s no time to really think, shorthand will have to suffice.

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Speculative Positioning in Selected Currency Futures

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

With the media playing up the US dollar's negatives, one would think speculators are short the greenback like there is no tomorrow. Yet a review of the Commitment of Traders report that covers the week through last Tuesday, August 4, shows that this is not really the case.

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FX Daily, August 10: Monday in August

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

Overview: The new week has begun slowly with Singapore and Tokyo markets closed for national holidays. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose 2% last week and edged higher today, led by 1.5%-1.7% rallies in South Korea and Australia.  Hong Kong was a notable exception and eased around 0.6%.

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The Economy Is Mortally Wounded

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

A fully financialized, totally debt and speculation-dependent economy is terminal once leverage and debt stop expanding exponentially. We all know the movie scene in which the character is wounded but dismisses it as no big deal, and then lurches into the closing sequence where we discover the wound was not inconsequential, it was mortal, and the character expires.

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House View, August 2020

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

We have revised up our euro area GDP forecast for 2020 to -8.5%, mainly due to improving data in Germany, which is better positioned to recover rapidly from the downturn than its European peers. Meanwhile, the US economy has shown signs of flatlining amid escalating covid-19 cases in the South. Consumer confidence has taken a hit, while weekly unemployment claims have been rising again.

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The Ant and the Grasshopper: A Window into Macro Part II

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

Regardless of the dollar's role and function in the world economy and the halls of finance, in the near and intermediate terms, investors and businesses are more concerned with foreign exchange prices.  The greenback has fallen out of favor. Its main supports, like wide interest rate differentials, favorable growth differentials, and political certainty if not stability, have weakened.

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Why Fed Bugs Really, Really Hate Gold

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

Judy Shelton, a Trump nominee to the Fed Board of Governors, may not have coined the excellent term "Fed Bug," but she used it to delicious effect in this 2019 Financial Times interview: “People call me a goldbug, and I think, well, what does that make them? A Fed bug,” she says.

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EM Preview for the Week Ahead

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

The dollar got some traction against the majors towards the end of last week. This weighed on EM FX, with the high best currencies TRY, BRL, CLP, and ZAR leading the losers. We downplay risk of contagion from Turkey, but we acknowledge it will keep investors wary of the countries with poor fundamentals.

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Coronavirus: Swiss health authority adds pregnant women to risk list

2020-08-09

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2020-08-09

After a number of recent studies that suggest pregnant women are exposed to higher risks from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) adds them to the list of people vulnerable to Covid-19. The FOPH reached its recent conclusion based on discussions with the Swiss society of gynecology and obstetrics. The society sets out the findings of a number of studies in a report.

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