As an apparent consequence of post-Brexit uncertainty, the effective federal funds (EFF) rate moved up from 38 bps in “yield” to 40 bps, and then even 41 bps on June 27. That rather tame reaction is due to the fact that there is nobody aside from primarily GSE leftovers trading in federal funds. That the market rate moved even 3 [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard The response to the much better than expected employment report today is quite interesting although not in a good way. Stocks will surely get most of the attention, assuming they continue to trade higher by the end of the day (they did), but other markets - bonds and gold - are not confirming the strength of the [...]
Nominal disposable income in Japan fell 4.4% year-over-year in May 2016. In what can only be a sign of the times being far too familiar in Japanese, real disposable income was thus slightly better at “only” -3.9%. For all the hundreds of trillions in new Japanese bank reserves provided by so many QE’s I have lost count, “real” in Japan [...]
In a regime where math acts as money, there are a few major potential chokepoints where shifts in math can become systemically important difficulties. In 2008, the most visible example was in repo haircuts, but the most devastating to the financial system certainly fixed income (MBS, in particular) correlation. The system could not survive rising correlation because nobody was prepared [...]
It might be expected that monetary policy would fail to achieve its goal in attempting to manage the economy when it cannot even meet its own basic technical requirements. The main lever of Fed policy continues to be the federal funds rate even though it is entirely irrelevant, and has been for a long time. There is much more to [...]
Even before the Brexit vote, momentum was shifting to defensive sectors. The rally in weak dollar sectors - other than the gold/silver mining industry - was looking very overbought and tired anyway, so Brexit was a good excuse to take some profits. Whether the dollar can retain the strength it has gained on this historic vote is the big question. [...]
The real nature of liquidity is not what you see today but what we might find when the going gets tough. Though it is an intangible concept (not that that hasn’t kept economists from trying to quantify it), we can reasonably assume that if overall liquidity today appears impaired under relatively benign conditions, it will be significantly worse as malignancy [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard While everyone was focused on the potentially negative impact of Brexit, the Census Bureau was reporting evidence of actual economic weakness in the form of the durable goods report. The report was weak pretty much across the board but the weakness in autos is particularly concerning. The auto industry, along with construction, has been a leader in [...]
A pretty wild day for the markets today after the UK voted to leave the European Union. Well, actually, it was just a referendum and non-binding but ignoring the will of the voters is not a good way to keep hold of the levers of power. So it probably does mean the UK will leave the EU. It certainly means [...]
It was a nice diversion while it lasted, I suppose. From the moment of the unfortunate murder of the British MP, funding markets, in particular, had been furiously “selling dollars” to get back some of the pound that was falling as Brexit had gained momentum. Media commentary talks about it as if that were the whole topic – it never [...]
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