It is remarkable the disparity in views on display by various markets and what that suggests about what is driving each. In stocks and especially junk bonds, you get the sense of a massive sigh of relief that “it’s all over”, and while scary for a time it’s back to momentum and not missing out on the big money bargains. [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard Survey based economic reports continue to run counter to real world, actual data. Since the real data tends to lag, an optimist would probably take this as good news. A pessimist would dismiss it altogether as useless survey based data. Me? I'm a realistic optimist. I see the survey based data as potentially positive since attitude and [...]
You can always tell what kind of monthly variation any economic account provides from the commentary by which it is described. And there are, apparently, only two options: upward variations mean stimulus is working; downward variation just means that there will be more stimulus. Even by this crude cipher, you can still discern the state of the economic world since [...]
The world cheered this morning’s trade estimates from China, as both exports and imports rebounded from a dismal start to the year. Exports rose 11.5% in March after falling 25% in February; imports fell “only” 7.6% after declining 13.8% the month before. Despite the difficulties with data calculations around the Lunar New Year, economists were quick with their usual glowing [...]
China’s official reported reserves rose in March for the first time in five months. Though reserves had fallen to barely $3.2 trillion in February, that was down just $28.6 billion from January, being already hailed as a success and a step in the right direction since that was less than a third of the shocking decline in January (-$99.5 billion). [...]
The risk budgets are again unchanged for this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between risk assets and bonds remains at 40/60. The changes in our indicators this month were not significant enough to warrant a change. Credit spreads stopped narrowing and have recently been widening again, ever so slightly. Valuations, long term momentum and the yield curve [...]
It’s never a good sign when bank stocks are leading any retreat, but that is especially the case given recent events when several high profile banks were at the epicenter of early 2016’s liquidation rerun. As usual, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse are the firms most mentioned and among those most disfavored at these times. The media struggles to find [...]
A few weeks back, on March 18, the Japanese government bond market was hit with a “buying panic” of some noteworthy proportion. Yields all across the curve dropped, which takes some doing since yields were already at that point mostly negative. Common sense forces any sane person to wonder if sanity itself remains relevant to global finance: That raises the [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard The economic reports since the last update present a dichotomy. While there has been an improvement in the surprises - more better than expected reports - the overall tone of the reports has been fairly negative. Part of the explanation for that is the plethora of regional Fed reports over the last two weeks, almost all of [...]
Everything I wrote in my last post on China’s PMI’s could be rewritten and reworded for the ISM version of American industry. The index rebounded to above 50 in March for the first time since last August. As noted with the Chinese PMI’s, that doesn’t necessarily mean that growth has returned only that March wasn’t likely as bad as January [...]
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