It's hard not to put all emphasis on missile tests and other serious forms of sabre rattling. Even doing so, as the bond market may be doing right now, however, misses the underlying. Everything at the moment traces back to mid-March, which in hindsight was a very eventful month in full far away from the Korean peninsula. Take, for example, [...]
According to orthodox theory, if interest rates are falling because of term premiums then that equates to stimulus. Term premiums are what economists have invented so as to undertake Fisherian decomposition of interest rates (so that they can try to understand the bond market; as you might guess it doesn’t work any better). It is, they claim, the additional premium [...]
You can understand to some small degree economists’ collective confusion about inflation. They believe in wage dynamics, where a recession through mass layoffs creates slack and thus depresses wages. The recovery in a period of robust growth re-employs those unfortunate workers, and after enough time when that slack is reduced or even eliminated wages accelerate again (increased competition for labor). [...]
In October 2015, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Bill Dudley admitted that the US economy might be slowing. In the typically understated fashion befitting the usual clownshow, he merely was acknowledging what was by then pretty obvious to anyone outside the economics profession. Dudley was at that moment, however, undaunted. His eye was cast toward the unemployment rate and that was [...]
Ten years ago yesterday, Bear Stearns sent a letter to shareholders of two specific hedge funds that it sponsored. Whenever anyone brings up the name now, you immediately know where this is going. That wasn’t the case in 2007, however. Whatever the world may think of Bear in hindsight, a decade ago it was a highly reputable firm. These two [...]
Retail sales were thoroughly disappointing in June. Whereas other accounts such as imports or durable goods had at least delivered a split decision between adjusted and unadjusted versions, for retail sales both views of them were ugly. Seasonally-adjusted first, spending last month was down for the second straight time. Worse than that, estimated sales were just barely more than in [...]
In the strict cohort of central bankers, at least the Fed isn’t yet the Bank of Japan. The BoJ is run by straight clowns, a sort of weird performance art maybe due to almost thirty years of accomplishing nothing. Federal Reserve officials can at least manage to sound legitimate if still acting without success. In the grand scheme of things, [...]
After the Fed “raised rates” a little over a week ago, the US treasury market responded with another collective shrug. Long-term rates fell rather than rose, having already responded that way to the prior two hikes. The word “conundrum” has sadly been revived. It is unfortunate because treasury market behavior in the middle of the last decade was never a [...]
Earlier this month, the BEA estimated that Disposable Personal Income in the US was $14.4 trillion (SAAR) for April 2017. If the unemployment rate were truly 4.3% as the BLS says, there is no way DPI would be anywhere near to that low level. It would instead total closer to the pre-crisis baseline which in April would have been $19.0 [...]
The economic surprises keep piling up on the negative side of the ledger as the Fed persists in tightening policy or at least pretending that they are. If a rate changes in the wilderness can the market hear it? Outside of the stock market one would be hard pressed to find evidence of the effectiveness of all the Fed's extraordinary [...]
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