Someone once said that the stock market is always climbing a wall of worry. Maybe that had been true in some long-ago day, but whether or not it might nowadays is beside the point. The nugget of truth which makes the prosaism memorable is the wall rather than the climber. There’s always something going on somewhere to get worked up [...]
You look at the two charts below, and immediately you see how something doesn’t add up. On the one side, US banks haven’t lent dollars to Russia since the first time the Russians ended up in Ukraine back around February 2014. The US government declared domestic firms wouldn’t do business with Russian banks and they really haven’t.Score a victory for [...]
Why is the yield curve so steep up at its front? The obvious answer is “rate hikes” and while technically true this leaves out an important set of historical facts. These are that the agency responsible for the rate hikes will, undoubtedly, stick with them regardless of actual conditions on the ground until a forward time when doing so could [...]
A nod to just how backward and upside down the world is now. The economic data everyone is made to pay attention to, payrolls, that one is, in my view, irrelevant. As is the consumer price estimates from earlier this week, the PCE Deflator. That’s another one which receives vast amounts of interest even though it is already old news.Yet, [...]
It’s been a while, but the BLS finally got around to releasing a near-perfect payroll report. These had been incredibly common even during prior downturns and near recessions, which should only raise questions about them. Among any immediate concerns, how relevant can these data points be?In our current day, like the consumer price data, they’re already old news. That’s not [...]
A tale of two economies? At first, it might seem that way. However, this isn’t the first time apparent divergences have arisen. On the contrary, “decoupling” is a recurrent theme even though, in the end, it never happens. Of the major data released today, one set from the United States, the other in China. The former seemingly justifying the Federal [...]
Though the fourth quarter US real GDP headline rate was left practically unchanged, there was some notable shuffling of its underlying details. In addition, we now have the full GDI estimates to work with, including the BEA’s figure for something called Net Operating Surplus, therefore some better (hopefully) understanding of the real story (in my view) behind why it’s not [...]
Though labor data, like the market it measures, is a lagging macro indicator, there’s some use in closely tracking any changes to it. Financial markets may send out profound warning signals, as they are now, about the future which aren’t (yet) showing up in the employment statistics, still those estimates might provide at least some background behind in this case [...]
One of the biggest intellectual crimes of the Volcker Myth is how it quashed what likely would have been fruitful (in my opinion) further examination into the monetary designs of the actual global reserve system. People today still whisper about some secret oil-soaked deal which saw UST’s end up in the hands of Arabia’s Saudis, as if this was something [...]
To begin with, the economy today is absolutely nothing like it had been almost thirty years ago. That fact in and of itself should end the discussion right here. However, comparisons will be made and it does no harm to review them.I’m talking about 1994, or, more specifically, the eleven months between late February 1994 and early February 1995. Fearing [...]
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