Part 1 is here. Even if the eurodollar paradigm had started shifting long before the full panic, this is not to say that various individual firms have not tried to rekindle the former construction; in fact, I have paid particular attention to those who at various points attempted the recreation. Citigroup is one of those though it isn’t clear what [...]
Proprietary trading has taken on connotations that are extreme for some good reason owing to the events of 2008. It was there, called “principal transactions” on some balance sheets, that claimed the majority of accounting losses that perpetuated internecine banking struggles from liquidity to revenue and earnings. As with most things, there was much more to it than that rough [...]
Just a few weeks ago FactSet was reporting analysts’ estimates for Q1 2016 EPS were looking to be a 6.9% decline year-over-year. Their latest update now suggests -8.0%, as the deterioration in earnings outlook is becoming the most significant part of the trend. During the first two months of Q1 2016, analysts lowered earnings estimates for companies in the S&P [...]
January and February economic accounts for China are notoriously difficult to judge because of the non-uniform occurrence of the Lunar New Year. That is why, for example, China’s National Bureau of Statistics doesn’t even bother with industrial production, retail sales or fixed asset investment in those individual months, preferring to combine them together in one release encompassing both January and [...]
Revolving consumer credit turned upward in March last year, which signaled to economists that the true end of the Great Recession was at hand. The largest impediment to the monetary version of the recovery was the “debt hangover” from the mortgage surge during the housing mania. Consumers, rightfully cautious after that disastrous experience, spent the early years of the “recovery” [...]
The fiscal year for retailers ended in January with nothing like what it was supposed to be. Still, as always, the suggestions remained that a rebound in consumerism would be before too long. If it wasn’t to be evident right away in February, the start of the 2016 fiscal year was at least supposed to be back in the plus [...]
Going only from the conventional interpretation of the optimistic 242,000 in payroll gains Friday, it is still remarkable how more than one-fifth of those purported job creations in February were due to activity in retail trade alone. The monthly variation estimate for the retail sector (not including wholesale or transportation of goods) was an especially robust +55k even though the [...]
Having established the farcical nature of wage interpretations on the shortest time scale, a wider contextual framework leads in the same direction of doubt. The point of any interest rate hike for monetary policymakers is to head off “inflation” before it gets out of hand; the economy “overheating.” Having undertaken sufficient (it is assumed) stimulus to surpass whatever hysteresis calculations, [...]
The February payroll estimate for the Establishment Survey was 242,000 with upward revisions to December and January, so we are told the labor market is surging once more. Last month when the Establishment Survey suggested “only” 151,000 (before revisions) it was taken as disappointing even though there is statistically no difference between 151k and 242k (a 90% confidence interval leaves [...]
During the global end of the Great Recession, Brazilian GDP contracted year-over-year in just three quarters. The worst was about -2.5% in Q1 2009, but by Q1 2010 GDP was rising 9% again. With the latest update today, Brazil’s GDP declined by just less than 6% year-over-year in Q4, representing the seventh consecutive contraction that doesn’t look to be ending [...]
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