Inflation is more than just any old touchy subject in an age overflowing with crude, visceral debates up and down the spectrum reaching into every corner of life. It is about life itself, and not just quality. When the prices of the goods (or services) you absolutely depend upon go up, your entire world becomes that much more difficult. For [...]
It wasn’t all that long ago when the media began to fill itself up with one story after another about how huge looming inflationary pressures were causing the entire “market” to rethink its lengthy and determined anti-reflationary stance. Back in March, for instance, S&P had joined this chorus by zeroing in on eurodollar futures, of all instruments, and coming back [...]
Back on February 25, Treasury auctioned 7-year notes and it did not go (as) well. Maybe you remember us saying something about it, and then again and again and… The prevailing view then – and now – was reflation hadn’t just accelerated, the true inflation long-promised by so much “money printing” (or at least by those who equate bank reserves [...]
The way it has been described since, yesterday’s CPI estimates for last month represented a seismic shift in the inflation debate. There is no more argument, apparently, and if that wasn’t apparent enough then today it was followed up with even more highly-touted evidence. Producer prices, the PPI, came up even more over-the-moon than those for consumers.The commodities portion, no [...]
Friday, July 14, 2000, was a bad day to be in Treasuries. The 10-year UST yield spiked 9 bps after the Census Bureau reported June 2000 retail sales growth had been nearly 10% year-over-year. That plus a similarly pleasant reading from the Federal Reserve for Industrial Production left bond traders rethinking their trades, a sudden burst of inflationary confidence which [...]
Words have meaning for a reason, to convey precise ideas easily and readily understood by the reader or listener. If you use the term “stimulus”, as its root already suggests you’d expect something to be stimulated by whatever is being classified using this specific grouping of letters/sounds. Context rounds out the meaning.For the last twenty years, you’d have been wrong [...]
One of the most common complaints I hear about the markets is that they are "divorced from reality", that they aren't acting as the current economic data would seem to dictate. I've been in this business for 30 years and I think I first heard that in year one. Or maybe even before I decided to lose my mind and [...]
While we consider the PPI’s view of inflationary pressures as overstated by simple arithmetic and the math of commodities, there’s no denying that producer prices have risen by a substantial amount. The question, the whole issue, is why. If it is truly because price pressures are building and have grown close to breaking out in systemic fashion, then that would [...]
It really is about abnormality. What I mean by that is, contrary to popular imagination fed by the Fed and other central banks, ever since 2008 the inflation paradigm has changed. The first global financial crisis (GFC1) has proven time and again how it wasn’t a one-off, and since it was a monetary breakdown (global dollar shortage) that’s been permanent [...]
This particular part of the hysteria is understandable, if thoroughly unconvincing. Forget the Fed and its bank reserves for moment, whatever those are now and then. The banking system is where it’s at, monetarily speaking, and it is the banking system which seems to have lost its handle on the money printing lever. If we’re focused beyond bank reserves and [...]
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