Maybe last Friday’s pretty awful payroll report shouldn’t have been surprising; though, to be fair, just calling it awful will be surprising to most people. Confusion surrounds the figures for good reason, though there truly is no reason for the misunderstanding itself. Apart from Economists and “central bankers” who’d rather everyone look elsewhere for the real problem. The Establishment Survey [...]
This is basically a rhetorical question drawn from a generally rhetorical exercise. We’ll never know for sure, this is about China, after all. Transparency is a Western obsession and a curse for the committed Communists. Particularly when the Party of “Science” starts to lose control of the situation when such a possibility has been treated as pure blasphemy.Did the Chinese [...]
Something very important happened last week. No, it had nothing to do with the stock market, at least not directly. There was a lot of volatility in stocks last week but in the end, the S&P 500 was down a mere 21 basis points (0.21%). Yes, growth stocks continued their march toward reality with the NASDAQ 100 down 1.25% but [...]
The US$ continues on its rampage, particularly zeroed in on China for simple if misunderstood reasons (that have nothing to do with “devaluation”). What about the rest of the marketplace, the other stuff which identifies the eurodollar’s various cycles? You know about T-bills, which, yet again today, are more like what the dollar is suggesting. Other than those, what’s the [...]
It appears as if most reactions to today’s April 2022 payroll were quite positive, maybe enthusiastic when they should not have been. Though the Establishment Survey - the CES headline number most people pay attention to - gained 428,000 over March’s tally, it was the “other” one which crashed down like last week’s negative GDP thud.From the CES view, you [...]
As a preface to this update ostensibly on Europe, it’s all really about Euro$ #5 sadly rounding into form. In this first part, I’m going to have resurrect the quotation marks surrounding the term “rate hikes”, or bring back RHINO (rate hikes in name only) given what’s going on in Treasury bills.Not rate hikes, or enough of them. Our dead [...]
Cue up the old VHS tapes of Bill Clinton. The former President was renowned for displaying, anyway, great empathy. He famously said in October 1992, weeks before the election that would bring him to the White House, “I feel your pain.”What pain? As Clinton’s chief political advisor later clarified, “it’s the economy stupid.”Jay Powell is no retail politician in near [...]
It’s never just one thing or another. Take, for example, collateral scarcity. By itself, it’s already a problem but it may not be enough to bring the whole system to reverse. A good illustration would be 2017. Throughout that whole year, T-bill rates (4-week, in particular) kept indicating this very shortfall, especially the repeated instances when equivalent bill yields would [...]
This is the difference, though in the end it only amounts to a matter of timing. When pressed (very modestly) on the slow pace of the ECB’s “inflation” “fighting” (theater) campaign, its President, Christine Lagarde, once again demonstrated her willingness to be patient if not cautious. Why?For one thing, she noted how Europe produces a lot of stuff that, at [...]
It’s one of those things which everyone just accepts because everyone says it must be true. If the US$ is rising, what else other than the Federal Reserve. In particular, the Fed has to be raising rates in relation to other central banks; interest rate differentials. A relatively more “hawkish” US policy therefore the wind in the sails of a [...]
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