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 [...]
Oil has easily, it appears, rebounded after having moved lower in November. It bottomed out that first big day of omicron fear on December 1 (ironically, or not, the same day the eurodollar futures curve inverted). Since a low of just over $65 (WTI), crude’s front futures price is easily back in the $80s thereby threatening to make January’s US [...]
When growth stops being growth, or the same growth, what do you do? The Keynesian textbooks all say “stimulus”, but what happens if the stimulus doesn’t stimulate? Worse, when it doesn’t stimulate because it can’t due to other pre-existing and intractable impediments.This is Xi Jinping’s dilemma and it only begins with the textbook’s missing chapters on eurodollar money.So, let’s start [...]
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Longtime readers/followers/enthusiasts will be forgiven for immediately thinking I’m quoting myself again, as I so often do: Following its emergence, the eurodollar market played a big role in the Bretton Woods system and also its breakdown and eventual demise in the early 1970s. The primary reason I refer so much to my own [...]
The term “geopolitics” has a specific meaning, though in the context of assessing markets and their equally ubiquitous though purposefully non-specific “jitters”, it’s basically a catch-all, too. Should the stock market, in particular, take a bad step, reflexive commentary is quick to call up geopolitics. Such was absolutely the case late in January 2018 into the following month of February. [...]
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 [...]
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. Rates have gone up, he reasoned [...]
Why are US banks borrowing hundreds of billions of US “dollars” (quotation marks fully deserved given the nature of these borrowings which are neither physical currency nor easily identifiable even on the global ledger, too many classified here as “other”) from themselves? Technically, for regulatory and accounting purposes “American” banks (a classification which includes domestic subsidiaries of foreign banks) are [...]
The script has been flipped, so to speak, this time around. Whenever we’d go through one of those regular, alternating downturns worldwide, like the one which began right from the start of 2018, it was services which held up the increasingly troubled manufacturing sector. The variation for the swing, from globally synchronized growth to globally synchronized downturn, was mostly contained [...]
Chinese Communists, like their counterparts everywhere around the world, they do love their metaphors. Speaking virtually at Davos again in 2022 like he had in 2021, the theme was largely the same. A year ago, China's dictator had warned about the uncertainty of the global recovery, a celebratory party only then getting going around those parts; he got that one [...]
Stay In Touch