A few weeks back, on March 18, the Japanese government bond market was hit with a “buying panic” of some noteworthy proportion. Yields all across the curve dropped, which takes some doing since yields were already at that point mostly negative. Common sense forces any sane person to wonder if sanity itself remains relevant to global finance: That raises the [...]
The only common factor on the economy viewed from the mainstream in the past few years is the shrinking standards by which it is judged. Janet Yellen can somehow suggest erratic 2% GDP growth is “overheating” or close to it only because that is the reduction of the “new normal.” Because that has been so declared by the very same [...]
You don't often see a move like this in a bond market. This the long term, high grade corporate bond ETF from SPDR, up 6.6% in the last month. I chose this chart because of what it shows about modern markets, which don't allow for much introspection on the part of investors. We're all traders now and when the momentum [...]
Following the explicit path of orthodox monetary and economic theory delves into something very much like Lewis Carroll’s monstrous rabbit hole he devised for Alice all the way back in 1865. Like the story’s Wonderland, the other side of the hole leads to some version of nonsense that seems to project, in the book’s case, the reader’s own senses. In [...]
US trade statistics for February improved in both exports and imports, but there are questions as to the reason for the reverse and whether it is actually meaningful. After abysmal performance in every segment and category in January, there was some give back in February including positive numbers in some places. That suggests that January’s trade activity might have been [...]
The basis for the ongoing economic paradigm shift that seems to be manifesting in a slow, lingering slowdown (that is now more than year into contraction) in the US and global economies can be nothing but the withdrawal of banks from the necessities of the credit-based reserve currency. So far, the updated bank reports for Q4 last year continue the [...]
Factory orders were slightly positive year-over-year (not seasonally adjusted), the first plus sign in this category since October 2014. While that may seem like a positive or at least a step in the right direction, instead it just continues to suggest the a-historic trajectory of whatever economic condition this is. To be even with February 2015 is no feat at [...]
While continuing to tout an economic recovery that is being missed by far too many, the government and economists say one thing and then move toward the other. The unemployment rate claims one economic version that is talked about openly, but then there are “little things” that various official capacities seek to carry out suggesting they realize full well the [...]
After a volatile but stagnant final two months of the year, in which the market straddled the moving averages with no clear direction, the S&P 500 Index (IVV) once again broke down in early January, before stabilizing at the 1867 low set in August 2015. It has rebounded since, breaking through both moving averages and coming to within a couple percentage [...]
In August 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to his good friend Joshua Speed who had lived in Springfield but had since returned to his childhood home in Kentucky. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had recently been overturned in Congress by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the nation was somewhat enthralled by the “know nothings” and their quasi-party. Lincoln had been [...]
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