Stocks are expensive. Really expensive. A wide gap has opened between the stock market and economic reality, and at some point, the gap between the two will close. Our Special Report on Market Valuations, Volume 4 in Jeff Snider's "Follow The Money" series, will help you detail how it might look when it inevitably closes, and will counsel you on how [...]
IHS Markit’s Composite US PMI rose to a 10-month high in January 2020. According to its flash estimate, the index was up to 53.1 from 52.7 in the final reading for December 2019. Driven by a rebound in the services component, the composite combines both the manufacturing and service PMI’s into a single number, Markit’s view is that the US [...]
Between the summer of 2011 and February 2012, the unemployment rate experienced its largest half-year drop since the huge recovery that had been taking place in 1984. It was a very welcome sign that the US economy may have avoided becoming entangled in the global funding messes of 2011. Caught flat-footed, as always, Ben Bernanke’s Fed had ended QE2 at [...]
The repo story especially as it is told from the TIC perspective is our main emphasis currently. However, there are other odds and ends in the series that deserve some separate attention if not to the same level. The dollar system is more than collateralized lending, and this will include a few items that I’m going to point out for [...]
Why haven’t US Treasury yields exploded higher? Sure, they are, at the long end, up from their lows set in late August when the rate for the 30-year long bond reached all the way down to a new record. The winds of sentiment have shifted, benefited by globally coordinated (not quite synchronized) monetary “stimulus” as well as a healthy dose [...]
What feeling do you have when you hear IRS? Is there a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach or do you just roll your eyes knowing that April 15th will be here all too quickly? Throw in the word audit and emotions and blood pressure can reach levels you never dreamed of. CPA Jim Buttonow has 30 years [...]
In the middle of 2018, Japan, they said, was riding so high. Gliding along on the tidal wave of globally synchronized growth, Haruhiko’s courage and more so patience had finally delivered the long-promised recovery. The Japanese economy had healed to a point that its central bank officials believed it time to wean the thing off decades of monetary “stimulus.” They [...]
The IMF yesterday downgraded its forecasts for global growth as well as its real GDP estimates for all the big economy regions. The organization now thinks GDP growth might have amounted to 2.9% last year. Not only the worst year since 2009, that was down from April 2019 approximations of 3.6% and the original forecasts which always start out near [...]
Chinese Industrial Production accelerated further in December 2019, rising 6.9% year-over-year according to today’s estimates from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). That was a full percentage point above consensus. IP had bottomed out right in August at a record low 4.4%, and then, just as this wave of renewed optimism swept the world, it has rebounded alongside it. Rather [...]
US retail sales were disappointing in December 2019, though it depends upon your perspective for what that means. Unadjusted, total retail sales were 6.01% more last month than the same month of the prior year. It was the highest year-over-year growth rate since October 2018. The reason was entirely due to base effects. You might remember Christmas 2018 for its [...]
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