It’s hard to believe it was only about three months ago. Time flies when disaster unfolds all around you. In early June, Brazil’s central bank arranged a press conference where its President Ilan Goldfajn would set everyone straight. The currency was falling, he admitted, but it would be easily handled by closely following the Portuguese version of the global central [...]
The PCE Deflator rose 2.31% year-over-year in July 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That makes five in a row for Jay Powell to try to make his case. Prior to March, the central bank had missed its target for the PCE Deflator in 68 out of 70 months using the 2012 dollar reference. Has something changed? Yes [...]
The US yield curve isn’t the only one on the precipice. There are any number of them that are getting attention for all the wrong reasons. At least those rationalizations provided by mainstream Economists and the central bankers they parrot. As noted yesterday, the UST 2s10s is now the most requested data out of FRED. It’s not just that the [...]
According to the Conference Board, US consumers are sky high. The business association’s index measuring consumer confidence jumped to a level it hasn’t seen since the apex of the dot-com days. Though I’m not sure that’s really a positive reflection on the economy, the mainstream verdict is as usual quite different. U.S. consumer confidence surged to near an 18-year high [...]
There are a few pretty good indications that inflation hysteria is long dead. Since this was one of the more extreme forms, it’s also relevant in parsing any shift from reflation back to deflation. There are any number of markets suggesting as much already. Still, this one really has to sting for sunny, confident Jerome Powell. From the St. Louis [...]
I don’t know how many different ways I can write this. Reserves are not insurance against monetary reversal, they are the calamity. If you have them, that only means you have a problem. And if you have a lot of them, well. The Financial Times yesterday writes again about Argentina. No matter what’s thrown at that country, nothing will staunch [...]
The UST yield curve continues to flatten (as it does elsewhere). All sorts of mainstream articles have been published lately about it. Many of them often refer to academic pieces ostensibly trying assuage all fears about the yield curve’s threatening inversion. Fret not the distortion, they say. And they are right. As I constantly remind people, it’s not inversion that [...]
Effective federal funds (EFF) was 1.92% again yesterday. That’s now eight in a row just 3 bps underneath the “technically adjusted” IOER. If indeed the FOMC has to make another one to this tortured tool we know already who will be blamed for it. The Treasury Department announced yesterday that it will be auctioning off $65 billion in 4-week bills [...]
Who can Jerome Powell thank for the PCE Deflator? Not Janet Yellen who handed off to him instead “transitory” factors. Nor was it globally synchronized growth which was supposed to have been the deciding element. Instead, it appears more and more that the only place where Chairman Powell might legitimately offer his gratitude is the US Congress. We have to [...]
I have to hand it to my colleague Joe Calhoun. In recent months, he’s been able to almost perfectly predict the Trump Administration’s response tactics to all this trade war stuff. Back in July, it was mere comments on the dollar. Not long thereafter, aid to farmers caught up in the China dispute. When that happened, Joe predicted it wouldn’t [...]
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