Following up from yesterday’s nod toward monetary policy irrationality, the “relevant” markets today continue to profess their concurrence with it all categorized in that manner. I’m not just critiquing the readings of economists at the Fed and their conditional responses, I’m stating unequivocally that the entire affair, and all in it, has been reduced to pure farce. That starts squarely [...]
To say that the “dollar” is a mess to begin the week is to state the obvious. The condition left at Friday’s close has persisted, with commodities and such being sold heavily from the outset. Japan’s renewed “recession” (I use quotes only in the conventional sense, given that the Japanese economy never truly left) hasn’t helped in that regard, but [...]
Copper prices closed yesterday at a new low just barely above the intraday low of August 24. In early trading today, the front maturity has blown past that point and traded as low as $2.164, and currently around $2.175 for another multi-year low. Crude prices are down sharply as well, though the trend in oil isn’t nearly as clear – [...]
For one, eurodollar futures are “obliged” to take account of any threats from the FOMC even though, in the end, they might only be self-fulfilling. Because the Fed has very little actual ability to condition money markets, none of that is truly “real” but there remains the unknown and money dealing agents still seem reticent about any kind of (further) [...]
With Chinese trade figures for September threatening a further reset, it is worth noting (yet again) that “dollar” funding isn’t much changed in October. In fact, there are several additional references to resuming the downward slide. Gold has been steadily bid since the September payroll report on October 2, while the eurodollar futures curve behaves much as it did (almost [...]
It has certainly been much calmer in October so far, especially compared with the deep deviations following the FOMC’s lack of activity. Stocks have rallied since October 1 along with many commodities, especially crude. Currencies have been almost mellow, with the ruble following oil prices upward, the real departing (for now) from its devastation and even those like the Indian [...]
While central banks would prefer to isolate oil prices as if in their own world with nothing at all to do with finance and economy more generally, it is oil prices that continue the disappointment connecting the “dollar” to the growing market (and therefore economic) wreck. Front month and spot crude prices had bounced around more favorably since the August [...]
It seems as if the PBOC is doing a whole lot and getting very little from it. That is actually expected at least to anyone not caught up in the cult of QE and the like, as that is the very nature of central banks dating back to the original at the Bank of England. Even though the focus has [...]
It looks like the reversal of Monday’s dramatic and frightful liquidation has held and gained in the past two days. From that we can infer, of only the near-term, that those forced repositions were enough to square the liquidity imbalance from the latest “dollar” run. The two words are related not just in a common semantic root, as liquidations are [...]
I think broad trading today actually confirms yesterday’s hypothesis of the marked appearance of fear. In reversing exactly (or nearly so) almost everything from yesterday, across the board, it seems as if the juxtaposition settles that interpretation. I noted that it wasn’t just gold bid in contrast to the selling and “dollar” frenzy, the Swiss franc had joined on the [...]
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