What a time to forget it was the month for yearly benchmark revisions. After making a huge deal out of these spread across all kinds of economic accounts put together by various government agencies, I hadn’t remembered how February each year the BLS makes its contributions to correcting economic records for the payroll and employment data. So, I wrote this [...]
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. [...]
This will be written off as a temporary setback, and only then will anyone care if it follows in Friday’s payroll report. Just when the FOMC was counting on corroboration among all labor market data for its taper/balance sheet runoff/rate hike justification, this morning ADP threw a whole sack of wrenches in those plans. In the wake of the sack, [...]
By no means are any of these PMI numbers terrible. In the vacuum of mainstream Economics' ceteris paribus fantasy, these might all be mildly pleasing. There is no such thing, however, and despite where they now are these are verging closer to comparisons which could be, several already have been, concerning. As such, the direction and trend being established as [...]
The BLS released its labor turnover data, or JOLTS, earlier today. There have been two main issues with it, starting with Job Openings (JO) which is widely cited along with the unemployment rate to represent the widely reported labor shortage theory. More controversial has been Quits, lately dubbed in the media as the Great Resignation for a variety of presumed [...]
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 [...]
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