All eyes on Europe today where ECB Governor Christine Lagarde tried very hard to avoid committing to either rate hikes or the timing of them. Always conditional, she says. However, everyone knows different. With her counterparts at the Federal Reserve already committed to panicking over CPI rates, the latest HICP inflation numbers in Europe are not going to take any [...]
You have to hand it to Willian Dudley. Having committed one egregious error after another while in charge of the Fed’s New York-based Open Market Desk during the first Global Financial Crisis, Bill was kicked upstairs anyway to run that entire central bank branch following the debacle. He then continued on in the same spirit and with the same results. [...]
Rate of change in economy goes down, rate of change in politics goes way up. The latter half of the formula, politics, historically applies to the internal makeup and stability of whatever country or system experiencing the macro drought as well as to its neighbors. Going back through time, any prolonged period when the economy was in distress (which typically [...]
Chinese authorities responded to their faltering economy in 2018 by diverging from their Western counterparts. Their PBOC would lean into rate cuts (RRR) at the very same time America's Federal Reserve would accelerate more in the direction of rate hikes. The ECB, for Europe’s part, intended to follow the Fed’s path, reaching December 2018 and terminating its own QE with [...]
Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun discusses last week's crazy market, earnings season, and changes to Alhambra portfolios.
I'll just get this out of the way right at the beginning. The question in the title of this post refers to the end of the ongoing stock market correction and the answer is likely no. There are no sure things in this business so it isn't an unequivocal no, but based on history, the odds favor more weakness. I [...]
With the first Federal Reserve rate hike widely anticipated (all but confirmed) for the March 15-16 FOMC meeting, this means that every one of the bill tenors with the exception of the 4-week are now inside that window. The 8-week maturity moved into it last week, on January 20, so its equivalent yield is now pricing higher alternative money rates [...]
Technically speaking, the rebound from the 2020 recession wasn’t strictly a supply shock. That was a huge part of it, no doubt, but a near-concurrent demand shock, if you will, also materialized. The combination of the two left the public bewildered, believing it an actual inflationary impasse which could only be further passed on into this year.Consumer prices did rise, [...]
Given yesterday’s Census Bureau data on retail and wholesale inventory, there was a solid though not necessarily good reason to suspect how today’s BEA report on US real GDP might surprise to the upside. The way GDP is tabulated, inventory contributes to the figured increase; the bigger the inventory build, the higher calculated output goes. The fourth quarter’s increase in [...]
It’s not hard to reason why there continues to be this conflict of interest (rates). On the one hand, impacting the short end of the yield curve, the unemployment rate has taken a tight grip on the FOMC’s limited imagination. The rate hikes are coming and the markets like all mainstream commentary agree that as it stands there’s nothing on [...]
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