Written Tuesday Oct 27 Even though oil production inside the United States has declined over the summer, it’s as if oil supply is all that continues to matter. With oil prices down significantly today, as well as since mid-October, the incessant appeal of oil supply blooms yet further even though there is so much more than that to take into [...]
Written Tuesday Oct 27 Anyone looking to buck the “dollar’s” direction in September has been sorely disappointed by almost every single data point so far. The latest is durable goods which was even more ugly across-the-board than August – and that includes the rather stark downward revisions for last month. Year-over-year, new orders (ex transportation) fell almost 6% after declining [...]
Written Monday Oct 26 If China and Europe provided any boost to mainline sentiment last week, everyone looks to Japan this week for perhaps disappointment, though there isn’t any good reason why. Perhaps as a fitting description of this current situation, one that I think appears more inevitable by the day and the week, the Bank of Japan apparently sits [...]
If central banks are now almost exclusively on the defensive, we have no shortage of anecdotes and data to explain it. For a good long while economists and commentary managed to keep the US safely “decoupled” from the “overseas” maelstrom, but the deluge locally has become far too much to ignore. This is far, far deeper than just some indistinct [...]
With the ECB openly admitting worries about its own QE trying to justify more of it and then China on Friday adding its own mix, the third consecutive “double shot” just since June 27, you can be forgiven for considering the idea that all this talk about a global economic downside is finally starting to be taken seriously. A little [...]
While on the other side of the Pacific economists try to decipher what China has truly gotten itself into, over the Atlantic the Europeans are admitting that trillion is again not “enough.” As I have written repeatedly, the adjectives attached to QE depend on the tense. Ahead of time, peering into the unwritten future, QE “will be” powerful and able, [...]
There is always some chicken and egg to any financial irregularity; as in does a crisis cause a panic or is it the panic that causes the crisis? Though the evidence of the past eight years is decidedly on the side of the irregularity, central banks continue to press as if that were not so. In no uncertain terms, central [...]
There must be a universal speech template included in the monetary textbook that is shared among the various central banks. On September 28, 2015, Haruhiko Kuroda, Governor of the Bank of Japan, delivered a speech that wasn’t just similar to the press conference Janet Yellen had endured only a week or so before, it was a close enough replica that [...]
It has become an unshakable article of faith that every customer lost by McDonald’s is one gained by any number of the “progressive” fast food chains that have arisen in the past decade. The common competitor cited is Chipotle; so much that searching for the two restaurant names together results in thousands of versions of what are really the same [...]
The further we get down the calendar away from China’s second biannual Golden Week the clearer the “dollar’s” influence on crude oil becomes, at least in the shorter maturities (and spot price). As usual, the “dollar” creates far more volatility at the front end than the back, where the longer maturities (recognizing more thinly traded months) tend toward economic considerations. [...]
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