Is there anyone left out there who doesn't know the rate of economic growth is slowing? The 10-year Treasury yield has fallen 45 basis points since peaking in mid-March. 10-year TIPS yields have fallen by the same amount and now reside below -1% again. Copper prices peaked a little later (early May), fell 16% at the recent low, and are [...]
And just like that, snap of the fingers, it’s gone. Without a “bad” Treasury auction, there was no stopping the bond market today from retracing all of yesterday’s (modest) selloff and then some. This despite the huge CPI estimates released before the prior session’s trading, and now PPI figures that are equally if not more obscene. The BLS reports today [...]
Three in a row, huge CPI gains. According to the BLS, headline consumer price inflation surged 5.39% (unadjusted) year-over-year during June 2021. This was another month at the highest since July 2008 (the last transitory inflationary episode). The core CPI rate gained 4.47% last month over June last year, the biggest since November 1991. More impressive (or worrisome, depending upon [...]
Until last week you hadn't heard much about the bond market rally. I told you we were probably near a rally way back in early April when the 10-year was yielding around 1.7%. And I told you in mid-April that the 10-year yield could fall all the way back to the 1.2 to 1.3% range. The bond rally since April [...]
Back at the end of May, Germany’s statistical accounting agency (deStatis) added another one to the inflationary inferno raging across the mainstream media. According to its flash calculations, German consumer prices last month had increased by the fastest rate in 13 years. Even using the European “harmonized” methodology (Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, or HICP), inflation had reached 2.4% year-over-year [...]
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. George Orwell, 1984 I have said many times and believe deeply that our job as investors is not to predict the future but merely to interpret the present as accurately as we can. I've also said and believe deeply that doing [...]
Consumer prices in Japan fell again in May, according to that country’s Ministry of Finance. The headline CPI was 0.1% less last month than it had been in the same month during 2020. Though it was the eighth straight for outright deflation, there was some good news in the core rate, if you could call it that, which flipped to [...]
Yesterday, lumber. Today, copper. The “doctor” has been in reverse for better than two months now, with trading in the current session pounding the commodity to a new multi-month low. Down almost $0.19 for the day, an unusual and eye-opening loss, this brings the cumulative decline to 9.2% since the peak way back on May 11.Is this just another modest [...]
I told you last week that there were strange things going on in the labor market but I had no idea how much of an understatement that really was. Much of last week's economic focus was on the inflation report but I think the JOLTS report may turn out to be more significant. Inflation was indeed pretty hot year over [...]
It isn’t all base effects, or even all that much of them. Though these were higher in May 2021 than they had been in April, US consumer prices have accelerated regardless. According to the BLS and its latest CPI estimates, the net change in its headline index last month from last May was an excitable 4.99% (unadjusted). That’s the highest [...]
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