American consumers binged again in April, though not much more than they had in March. Previously delivered government stipends continue to inflate retail activity if not much else. According to the Census Bureau, retail sales rose “just” 0.7% last month when compared to the month before it. Given that March had been up (revised) nearly 11% versus February, any even [...]
72.0: Warren Buffett Knows Stocks but Not Money———Ep 72.0 Summary———Warren Buffett knows stocks but not money. From 2009-12 Warren Buffett warned that emergency monetary and fiscal action would make inflation surge. He warned that the US dollar was in the hands of a profligate Congress; that Treasuries would lose real value. He was wrong. On all counts. ———See It———– Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_AIPTwitter: https://twitter.com/EmilKalinowskiAlhambra [...]
The way it has been described since, yesterday’s CPI estimates for last month represented a seismic shift in the inflation debate. There is no more argument, apparently, and if that wasn’t apparent enough then today it was followed up with even more highly-touted evidence. Producer prices, the PPI, came up even more over-the-moon than those for consumers.The commodities portion, no [...]
I’m going to start with what might seem to be somewhat of a non sequitur if only because it’s one of those things you just have to laugh at. Researching historical cases and examples, I typically try to read as many contemporary thoughts or news articles as possible to gain a sense of what “everyone” was thinking at whichever times.In [...]
Friday, July 14, 2000, was a bad day to be in Treasuries. The 10-year UST yield spiked 9 bps after the Census Bureau reported June 2000 retail sales growth had been nearly 10% year-over-year. That plus a similarly pleasant reading from the Federal Reserve for Industrial Production left bond traders rethinking their trades, a sudden burst of inflationary confidence which [...]
71.0: Collateral Supply Effect on Central Bank Policy———Ep 71.0 Summary———Professor Sissoko focuses attention on the fact that the post-2008 financial system has changed dramatically but that technocrats have not tackled what the changes mean. Sissoko discusses the path to the 2008 and 2020 shocks and proposes we turn the clock back to a wiser time. ———See It———– Twitter: https://twitter.com/@csissokoSocial Science Research [...]
Forget gazelles, the ongoing post-2008 threat to small and medium-sized businesses had amounted to an unnatural vise squeezing owners and operators in between their persistent inability to access credit and the lack of revenue growth (or even predictability). The biggest businesses thrived, borrowed freely, and then paid shareholders in the form of gross buybacks (a liquidity preference of their own). [...]
Because it was outdated by publication of the most recent payroll data for April 2021, the follow-up updated JOLTS estimates for March don’t end up having quite the same impact. In one sense, that’s unfortunate because they are once again providing another useful demonstration of the limitations over decoding the employment situation.Job Openings (JO), for one. Before getting to them, [...]
One of the most deceptive stumbling blocks to figuring this whole thing out has been the rigidly binary approach to whatever any central bank does. The public is given one of only two choices: either monetary policies have been Goldilocks, just right; or, the message from critics, it is always ever in danger of being too good. That’s it; those [...]
Awash in “stimulus”, but none able to dent a semiconductor shortage which is purportedly the reason for production woes. In the US and many other places around the world, governments have gone nuclear, with America’s federal authorities dropping checks with abandon. This has created, according to some, everyone in the media, a red hot economy right on the verge of [...]
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