On Friday, the CFTC posted its COT data for the first week in 2019. For crude oil, capitulation. For US Treasury bond futures, capitulation. In the latter financial market, unsurprisingly the net market position utterly collapsed during December. From a relatively high (meaning market overall short) +58k contracts that last week in November when everyone piled into liquidity hedges, the [...]
I’ve observed a lot that’s purely absurd the last eleven years, trying hard to write up as much of it as I can. It's worth the effort in terms of education but also to reveal what's really going on. The catalog is too long to republish here in its entirety. One of the most ridiculous anecdotes, however, was pieced together [...]
They staked everything on inflation. In truth, central bankers had no other choice. Having backed themselves into such a narrow corner by doing the same thing over and over and over again, it was only going to be one or the other. Either it worked or for all time they would prove they really have no idea what they were [...]
Everyone hates LIBOR, until it does something interesting. It used to be the most boring interest rate in the world. When it was that, it was also the most important. Though it followed along federal funds this was only because of the arb between onshore (NYC) and offshore (mainly London, sometimes Caymans) conducted by banks between themselves and their subs [...]
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is in a bit of a tough spot. Being subject to the federal government shutdown meant shutting down the various Commitment of Traders (COT) reports for all the products listed on the exchange. There are a lot of them. Though the government and therefore the CFTC has reopened, it is going to be some [...]
Germany is a tough one to get around. Argentina falls into a bad recession, you can get by believing that’s not particularly unusual or interesting. If its neighbor Brazil becomes shaky, you can still chalk it up to EM volatility. Italy is Europe’s perpetual basket case. China’s a little more difficult, but still that country has its own unique problems. [...]
As more and more data rolls in even in this delayed fashion, the more what happened to end last year makes sense. The Census Bureau updated today its statistics for US trade in November 2018. Heading into the crucial month of December, these new figures suggest a big setback in the global economy that is almost certainly the reason markets [...]
In the continued absence of regular data, as the US federal government attempts to get back up to speed before the next lull, it is perhaps appropriate to continue on with this week’s parade of anecdotes. Here I’ll discuss three of them, each seemingly unrelated to the others. To begin, we start with Chinese robots. It is the age of [...]
Since I don’t speak Japanese, I’m left to wonder if there is an intent to embellish the translation. Whoever is responsible for writing in English what is written by the Bank of Japan in Japanese, they are at times surely seeking out attention. However its monetary policy may be described in the original language, for us it has become so [...]
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdotes is not data. It might also be said that the plethora of anecdotes does not make for accurate news. Before around mid-December 2018, media outlets particularly those like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal anxious to vindicate the technocrats at the Federal Reserve couldn’t print enough stories about the labor shortage. Barely [...]
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