Global stock markets, especially in the US, have made a furious comeback from the lousy start of the year. At its worst level the S&P 500 was down 11% year to date and 15% from its peak late last spring. At that nadir the market was trading at roughly the same level as November of 2013, over two years of [...]
The pain of Credit Suisse and its holdover peers, such as Deutsche Bank, is incredibly easy to understand. There is no need for penetrating the depths of technical jargon in interest rate swaps, forward warehousing securities or even the whole varied business of investment banking. In its Q1 2014 quarterly report, Credit Suisse spells out everything you need(ed) to know: [...]
The last month has seen a shift in the fortunes of energy stocks with the sector leading the pack with a return over 11%. Will it last? That probably depends more on the direction of the US dollar than it does any of the alleged production agreements that get so much press and rarely produce anything other than a press [...]
There is certainly not enough attention paid to the evolution of eurodollars and even less devoted to how it all started. In my analysis, those two facets are inseparable as the origins of the eurodollar space tell us a lot about how and why it became what it is. The Japanese, for instance, were being squeezed by really unrelated funding [...]
In late summer last year, just in time to accompany the first blast of contraindicated economic reality, Statistics Canada announced that Canadian GDP had contracted in Q2 2015. That followed an “unexpected” drop in Canadian GDP in Q1 which was supposed to be like oil prices and only a “transitory” deviation on the road to ultimate monetary policy success. Even [...]
By April last year, it had become clear that conditions in China were heading into dangerous territory. Even though most mainstream attention was fixed on the then-still growing stock bubble, there was so much that was wrong almost everywhere else. The economy would not stop slowing, and indeed still has not. The financial system was worse, so much so that [...]
Oil prices remain ebullient, relatively, compared to the dismal start to the year. Everything else, it seems, is driven by that background which means “dollar.” In that respect, we look to China or at least the Asian version of the “dollar” for guidance on triangulating funding conditions and future potential positioning. The CNY exchange is still within the post-Golden Week [...]
Existing home sales as reported by the National Association of Realtors fell 7.1% in February 2016 from the month before. It was a very large decline but followed a two-month surge beginning December 2015; which itself came after an unusually large decline in November. In other words, housing and home sales seems to be that much more volatile of late. [...]
According to Discern Investment Analytics, the number of retail store closings in the first two months of 2016 was about a third more than the closings in the same two months last year. That’s bad news just in terms of the raw increase, but more so given that there was a wave of shutting retailer outlets last year, too. Store [...]
The yield on the Japanese government’s 10-year paper traded negative yesterday for the 17th straight session. When Haruhiko Kuroda first announced his negative rate experimentation, the 10-year JGB was low but still safely positive, yielding 22.9 bps on January 28. It would be negative for the first time on February 9 right as the rest of the world started to [...]
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