Benchmark revisions have visited the BLS JOLTS survey, too. And yes, they’ve been smoothed. To that end, the hawkishly-watched Job Openings (JO) trend has been altered. Before this week’s release, JO had peaked like the Establishment Survey back last summer and had seemed to soften since. Now, JO continues on an upward bend rather than downward.For JOLTS Hires (HI), the [...]
The 1947-48 experience was truly painful, maybe even terrifying. The US and Europe had just come out of a decade when the worst deflationary consequences were so widespread that the period immediately following quickly erupted into the worst conflagration in human history. Then, suddenly, consumer prices skyrocketed and it left many Americans wondering if there would ever be an end [...]
This is a truly weird shape for the US Treasury curve to find for itself. Really steep up front, seriously upward sloping consistent with the Fed’s stated rate hike intentions (which influence short-term rates most directly up to around the 2-year note). From there on down, though, it’s flat. As in pancake, almost. I can’t recall a time when the [...]
We’ve seen the combination of last year’s over-ordering together with some improvement in the transportation of goods become this year’s record surge (some of this prices) for inventories. Across the supply chain, retailers have been hit with the most recently but there’s been excessive builds for wholesalers, too, along with manufacturers. This potential problem compounds if or when consumer sales [...]
At first glance, or first exposure to this, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why all these so many pieces could be related. Outwardly, from the mainstream perspective, anyway, you’d think them random, and even if somehow correlated they’re supposed to be in the opposite way from what’s happened. Too much money, they said. It began with the Fed’s [...]
Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun discusses the impact of the Ukraine/Russia situation on oil, recession, European stock markets, and Alhambra portfolios.
Crude oil prices rose over 25% last week and as I sit down to write this evening, the overnight futures are up another 8% to around $125. Almost every other commodity on the planet rose in prices last week too, as did the dollar. Those two factors - rising dollar and rising commodity prices - mean the likelihood of recession [...]
If only, like in the aftermath of the Apollo 13 explosion, we could just radio Houston to get started in figuring out just the way out of our fix. Mission Control would certainly buzz all the right people with the right stuff, summoning the best engineers and scientists from their quiet divans to the frenzied and dangerous work ahead. Sadly, [...]
Though I say, write, and communicate all the time how the Federal Reserve is not a central bank because it doesn’t do money and that therefore its non-money monetary policies are little more than pop psychology conveyed via an increasingly stale puppet show, you might be surprised to learn that none other than Janet Yellen has publicly agreed with my [...]
Remember the summer slowdown? Not last year’s, the first one. Back around July and August 2020 when what was supposed to have been a V-shaped recovery fell way off that trend. Instead, blamed on something with COVID, the US (and global economy) limped its way toward the end of that year just in time for its sugar-rush restart via helicopter.Twenty-twenty’s [...]
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