Nobody, and I mean nobody, does premature celebrations like central bankers. When it comes to their non-money monetary policies and the inflation they seek to create from them, time and again officials in every jurisdiction spike the ball at least 30 yards before they reach the endzone. Whenever one or another consumer price measure ticks up, or accelerates dramatically as [...]
Most Americans understandably have tunnel vision when it comes to the American CPI and what it might portend for their personal circumstances. Gasoline prices and those for anyone trying to buy a car or now rent some kind of shelter, the threat is immediate. From this palpable sense, the word “transitory” today might just seem offensive.Yet, it may prove itself [...]
The FOMC is going to hike rates maybe even aggressively. There’s not much dispute on this assumption. Why the Committee might be doing so, that’s a whole detailed debate. The Treasury yield curve is building toward inversion while the crucial (and leading) Euro$ futures curve is already substantially upside down.Both are increasingly confident market bets against the FOMC’s position(s).Jay Powell [...]
NOTE: This post was written on Thursday, February 10. This isn’t typical. Both the speed at which this has come about and the depth to which the it has now sunk, the yield curve’s wild flattening is simply breathtaking. Today’s accelerating CPI print accelerated the distortions all over the Treasury market such that it has taken a shape along key [...]
The script has been flipped, so to speak, this time around. Whenever we’d go through one of those regular, alternating downturns worldwide, like the one which began right from the start of 2018, it was services which held up the increasingly troubled manufacturing sector. The variation for the swing, from globally synchronized growth to globally synchronized downturn, was mostly contained [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Have oil producers shot themselves in the foot, while at the same time stabbing the global economy in the back? It’d be quite a feat if it turns out to be the case, one of those historical oddities that when anyone might honestly look back on it from the future still hung in disbelief. Let’s start by reviewing just the [...]
For the FOMC, there was no alternative. The CPI’s keep going higher while the unemployment rate continues lower. Those who are Economists and practice Economics’ brand of econometrics, these would be scary times ahead. Inflationary times unless someone puts a stop to them first. Not because of consumer prices today, but because officials are worried consumers are becoming normalized to [...]
The bond market is imploding, right? It has to be going by everything you hear. Did you know that the last two 30-year bond auctions had gone “awry”, as one mainstream news outlet put it? Another "media" shop declared them “catastrophic.”The second of those long bond sales was conducted just yesterday afternoon, right in time to run into the buzzsaw [...]
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