ECB Governor Christine Lagarde surprised, maybe even shocked most people when a few days ago it was reported she’d told her fellow policymakers to keep their mouths shut. Don’t go running to the financial media. Justifying the censorship, Lagarde said it was important for the central bank’s key officials to present a unified front given some drastic challenges over the [...]
It wouldn’t be Euro$ #5 without perhaps the last of its rituals completed: the mainstream downgrades. Go back in time to each of the prior episodes, markets change, the data inflects, and then only later do surprised, shocked Economists at whichever establishment outpost begin to recalculate their DSGE outputs. Every time.Way back in 2015, it took the IMF’s semi-annual World [...]
Last Friday, S&P Global (the merged successor to IHS Markit) reported that its PMI for German manufacturing fell to 54.1. It hadn’t been that low for more than a year and a half. Worse than that, the index for New Orders dropped below 50 for the first time since the middle of 2020. The excuses are plentiful, as there’s COVID, [...]
For one thing, that whole Bretton Woods 3 thing is really off to an interesting start. And by interesting, I mean predictably backward. According to its loud and leading proponent, China’s yuan was supposed to be ascending while the dollar sank, its first step toward what many still claim will end up in some biblical-like abyss. Instead, CNY is doing [...]
No Place to Hide! Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun talks about the disastrous close to last week's market, its causes, and results.
Well, that was an ugly week. Of the six major assets we track, only one was up last week - REITs. Large and small-cap stocks - down. General commodity indexes - down. Gold - down. Bonds - down. The early part of the week was actually pretty calm but Thursday and Friday - especially that close on the low Friday [...]
This must be what the NBER feels like. That group of academic Economists simply took up the job of “declaring” each end of the business cycle. No one seems to have asked them to, nor was there any mandate official or otherwise. Sensing the opportunity, believing the job in keeping with the organization’s competence, or self-assessment of it, the NBER [...]
For the third month in a row, China’s PBOC refrained from guiding its quasi-credit benchmark lower. This seemed out of line with what Premier Li Keqiang, in particular, had stated last week before authorities did drop the RRR rate on Friday. Saying that China would “step up” support for its faltering economy, however the RRR cut was half of what [...]
The month of February 2022, the calm before the latest storm. Russians went into Ukraine toward the month’s end, collateral shortage became scarcity, maybe a run right at February’s final day, and then serious escalations all throughout March – right down to pure US Treasury yield curve inversion.Given that setup, it was unsurprising to find Treasury’s February TIC data mostly [...]
What everyone is saying, because it’s convenient, is that China’s zero-COVID policies are going to harm the economy. No. Economic harm of the past is the reason for the zero-COVID policies. As I showed yesterday, the cracking down didn’t just show up around 2020, begun right out in the open years beforehand, born from the scattering ashes of globally synchronized [...]
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