The reason that store shelves are occasionally empty, as any social media hashtag trend will tell you, is that Americans are still buying an amazing amount of goods. For December 2021, Christmas was hardly canceled. The Census Bureau today reported that retailers during the biggest month of last year, of every year, grabbed an astoundingly huge $714 billion in overall [...]
Real yields have moved higher, surging, actually, to start this year (up until more recently, that is). The 5-year TIPS rate has gone from ungodly ugly mid-November, sunk down to -191 bps, to a still-awful but much less so -130 bps as of today. That’s a 61 bps move in less than two months, thirty of those coming since the [...]
Dark leverage, that’s the real stuff. In a ledger-based monetary system, money creation comes from expanding leverage. Simple. Clean. Obvious. How it gets done, that’s the genius, the beauty, and the disaster. Call it money of account, or ghost money, fictional currency, whatever. It’s the secret sauce which, when you see it, you just can’t un-see it. This is the [...]
How is that US Treasury rates out in the independent longer end of the yield curve have now “suffered” a seven percent CPI to go along with double taper and triple maybe quadruple (if the whispers are to be believed) rate hikes this year, yet have weathered all of that allegedly bond-busting brutality with barely a market fluctuation? The short [...]
No one knows what the future holds. Not me, not you, and certainly not Wall Street. But while the future is impossible to see, the present is clear for anyone willing to listen to the story the market tells every day. Here's what it said in 2021: Click here to download “2021 In Review: Year End Economic Assessment” (Sign-Up Required). This report includes [...]
The Federal Reserve, like other central banks around the world, it does lend out the securities it owns and holds. Sophisticated modern wholesale money markets are highly collateralized, so much so that collateral itself takes on the properties of currency. Elasticity of collateral is as much – if not more – important as elasticity of other forms of wholesale money [...]
A full part of the inflation hysteria, the first one, was the dollar’s looming crash. The currency was, too many claimed, on the verge of collapse by late 2017, heading downward and besieged on multiple fronts by economics and politics alike. Basically, the Fed had “printed” too much “money” and the Chinese playing some “long game” were purportedly ready at [...]
When Alan Greenspan sat in front of the politicians in Congress back in February 2005, he purposefully made it seem like what was taking place at that time was some kind of new and unusual development. Yeah, the guy who had previously become famous for fedspeak – the ability to use a lot of words while saying nothing – would [...]
Alhambra CEO Joe discusses a shift in the market the first week of the new year, as well as the dollar, a big miss on employment numbers, a high quits rate, and good export numbers.
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche The new year got off to quite a bang last week. It was almost as if someone flipped a switch and investors/traders suddenly decided that all that stuff they believed last year was just so passe. Growth stocks? Nah, who wants [...]
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