Oil has easily, it appears, rebounded after having moved lower in November. It bottomed out that first big day of omicron fear on December 1 (ironically, or not, the same day the eurodollar futures curve inverted). Since a low of just over $65 (WTI), crude’s front futures price is easily back in the $80s thereby threatening to make January’s US [...]
When growth stops being growth, or the same growth, what do you do? The Keynesian textbooks all say “stimulus”, but what happens if the stimulus doesn’t stimulate? Worse, when it doesn’t stimulate because it can’t due to other pre-existing and intractable impediments.This is Xi Jinping’s dilemma and it only begins with the textbook’s missing chapters on eurodollar money.So, let’s start [...]
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Longtime readers/followers/enthusiasts will be forgiven for immediately thinking I’m quoting myself again, as I so often do: Following its emergence, the eurodollar market played a big role in the Bretton Woods system and also its breakdown and eventual demise in the early 1970s. The primary reason I refer so much to my own [...]
The term “geopolitics” has a specific meaning, though in the context of assessing markets and their equally ubiquitous though purposefully non-specific “jitters”, it’s basically a catch-all, too. Should the stock market, in particular, take a bad step, reflexive commentary is quick to call up geopolitics. Such was absolutely the case late in January 2018 into the following month of February. [...]
Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun talks about the return of fear to the market, the 2022 selloff in risky assets including large-cap growth, what's going on with volatility, REITs, bonds, commodities, and if it's time to get greedy.
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. - Philip Roth Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful. - Warren Buffett The new year hasn't gotten off to a great start for growth stocks or [...]
We’ve been here before, near exactly here. On this side of the Pacific Ocean, in the US particularly the situation was said to be just grand. The economy was responding nicely to QE’s 3 and 4 (yes, there were four of them by that point), Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had said in the middle of 2013 it was becoming [...]
It should be as simple as it sounds. Lower LT UST yields, less growth and inflation. Thus, higher LT UST yields, more growth and inflation. Right? If nominal levels are all there is to it, then simplicity rules the interpretation. Visiting with George Gammon last week, he confessed to committing this sin of omission. Rates have gone up, he reasoned [...]
Why are US banks borrowing hundreds of billions of US “dollars” (quotation marks fully deserved given the nature of these borrowings which are neither physical currency nor easily identifiable even on the global ledger, too many classified here as “other”) from themselves? Technically, for regulatory and accounting purposes “American” banks (a classification which includes domestic subsidiaries of foreign banks) are [...]
The script has been flipped, so to speak, this time around. Whenever we’d go through one of those regular, alternating downturns worldwide, like the one which began right from the start of 2018, it was services which held up the increasingly troubled manufacturing sector. The variation for the swing, from globally synchronized growth to globally synchronized downturn, was mostly contained [...]
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