Weekly Market Pulse (VIDEO)
Alhambra CEO Joe discusses a shift in the market the first week of the new year, as well as the dollar, a big miss on employment numbers, a high quits rate, and good export numbers.
Weekly Market Pulse: On Second Thought…
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche The new year got off to quite a bang last week. It was almost as if someone flipped a switch and investors/traders suddenly decided that all that stuff they believed last year was just so passe. Growth stocks? Nah, who wants [...]
Taper Discretion Means Not Loving Payrolls Anymore
When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money.The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it [...]
Conflict Of Interest (rates): 10-year Treasury Yield Highest in Almost Two Years
The dollar was high and going higher. Emerging markets had been seriously complaining. In one, the top central banker for India outright warned, “dollar funding has evaporated.” The TIC data supported his view, with full-blown negative months, net selling from afar that’s historically akin to what was coming out of India and the rest of the world. China was cutting [...]
Previewing Payrolls By PMIs
With the monthly Friday Payroll Ritual lurking tomorrow morning, and having been focused on PMI estimates before it, a quick look at the ISM’s Non-manufacturing PMI especially its employment index to bridge the latter to the former. The update today for the month of December put the headline estimate at 62.0, down from 69.1 the month prior.Omicron?While a rather sharp [...]
As The Fed Seeks To Justify Raising Rates, Global Growth Rates Have Been Falling Off Uniformly Around The World
Sentiment indicators like PMI’s are nice and all, but they’re hardly top-tier data. It’s certainly not their fault, these things are made for very times than these (piggy-backing on the ISM Manufacturing’s long history without having the long history). Most of them have come out since 2008, if only because of the heightened professional interest in macroeconomics generated by a [...]
Before Nodding Along w/FOMC’s Hawks On Inflation, First Grab Yourself A Beveridge
The Beveridge Curve was a useful guide for checking the intuitive relationship between the economic demand for labor and the actual use of it. Downward sloping, what it implies is that as more companies demand more labor the less unemployment there should be. No duh, right?Because of this fundamental relationship, we might also use the Beveridge Curve in order to [...]
How Many More Americans Might Have Quit Their Jobs Than The Huge Number Already Estimated, And What Might This Mean For FOMC Taper
There were a few surprises included in the BLS JOLTS data just released today for the month of November (note: the government has changed its release schedule so that JOLTS, already one month further in arrears than the payroll report, CES & CPS, will now come out earlier so that its numbers are publicly available for the same monthly payrolls [...]
ISM’s ‘Inflation’ Number Went Way Down (again)
Because there is no actual money in monetary policy, central banks have forced themselves (by having abandoned the monetary system decades ago) into an economic role that looks something like a hypnotist’s. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, the man said, but in lieu of any practical experience in money what is a central bank to do?Manipulate emotion. Give it a [...]
As The Fed Tapers: What If More Rapid (published) Wage Increases Are Actually Evidence of *Deflationary* Conditions?
Since the Federal Reserve is not in the money business, their recent hawkish shift toward an increasingly anti-inflationary stance is a twisted and convoluted case of subjective interpretation. Inflation is money and if the Fed was a central bank the issue of consumer prices wouldn’t necessarily be simple, it would, however, be much simpler: is there or isn’t there too [...]
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