The US Treasury auctioned off $45 billion in 3-month (13w) bills this morning. Despite the Federal Reserve paying 5 bps for SOMA UST collateralized, for “some” reason the primary market’s players wanted this issue far more. The auction’s high was just 3.5 bps, its median 2.5. These are down from 4 bps and 3.5 bps, respectively, last Monday. With the [...]
Some wanted to call it China’s Bear Stearns, and over time it may end up being seen that way. And that would be the right way to see it. What Bear’s March 2008 demise had represented was the watershed event for the eurodollar system, the final straw which finally broke the camel’s back. In the same way, CNY's was broken [...]
The American people were first introduced to the Treasury helicopter in 2008, not 2021. The Bush Administration's “radical” approach to keeping the Great “Recession” from becoming a contraction, obviously, failed spectacularly even though the initial returns had been positive – literally positive in how Q2 ’08 GDP suddenly turned higher as if this was by skilled design. Economists, including those [...]
Those pesky base effects. For most of the world’s economic data, these have contributed much to creating the misimpression the global economy is doing well, if not on fire. By comparing data now (or a month ago) to the same a year earlier, boy can it look splendid. In the stock business, they’re called easy comps.The Chinese, however, have just [...]
The inflation hysteria striking the US just hasn’t caught on elsewhere. China is a perfect example of resisting the strain. According to new figures from the Chinese government, consumer price inflation had retreated again during August 2021. The year-over-year change for their CPI was just 0.8%. This was the lowest since March, the fourth straight month of decelerating price changes.China’s [...]
By the summer of 2018, there were already any number of economic warning signs over globally synchronized growth fading fast. Many if not most of them market-based, of course, but not all. In the realm of sentiment, for example, the Germans in particular had put their finger on the pulse of the global economy and found it suspiciously feeble, economic [...]
Inflation is sustained monetary debasement – money printing, if you prefer – that wrecks consumer prices. It is the other of the evil monetary diseases, the one which is far more visible therefore visceral to the consumers pounded by spiraling costs of bare living. Yet, it is the lesser evil by comparison to deflation which insidiously destroys the labor market [...]
The economic slowdown we've been writing about for months officially arrived last Friday in the form of a particularly weak employment report. The number of new jobs created last month - or at least the WAG the BLS makes at such things on a monthly basis - was a mere 235,000 or roughly a cool half-million less than expected by [...]
We are going to start here with Europe before heading to Australia and then getting to China – and then currency. Why the ECB? It is going through the same pangs of dissatisfaction as its cousin the Federal Reserve had last summer. Like the Fed in 2020, Europe’s central bank in 2021 has climbed to the end of its grand [...]
At great risk of upsetting China’s army of censors, I’m going to “slander” the Chinese economy anyway. Were I a comrade within that particular nation, I’d now get labeled a “black mouth” spreading misinformation in the form of actual up-to-date data published by the same Communist government fearing its spread. Rate of change in the economy goes down, rate of [...]
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