She's been a bad girl. She's like a chemical. Though you try to stop it, she's like a narcotic. You wanna torture her. You wanna talk to her. All the things you bought for her, putting up your temp'rature. Pump it up until you can feel it. Pump it up when you don't really need it. Elvis Costello [...]
Even if you believe that the economy we find today is irrelevant to one that will result from a range of better policies under a Trump administration, you still have a timing problem. I fully believe that “reflation” has to this point been about promise, and that mostly relates to what can “only” be different now that the age of [...]
Markets have moved sharply over the last month, mostly in the post-election period. Stocks are up - small caps exuberantly so - the dollar is up, bonds and gold are down. Surprisingly though, our indicators did not move all that much. The direction of change in the indicators is consistent with the moves in assets but not the magnitude. The [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard The reported economic data of the last few weeks (it's been 3 weeks since my last update so I guess technically this isn't the Bi-Weekly Review) provides about as much direction and insight as the polls conducted prior to the election. To my eye, the trend here is trendless with a decidedly mixed set of data, each [...]
Where are we in history when the avowed Socialist (capital “S”) from Vermont is the only voice of reason for the Democratic Party in the aftermath of last week’s election? I don’t intend to make this some kind of political screed against one party or the other; I am on record numerous times claiming the America we live in of [...]
Back in June I mused about a Trump election: Forget for a minute that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. Think about the policies he is likely to propose as President and how they might affect the markets. Forget the campaign rhetoric for a minute, the things he’s proposed that can’t get done because the US President isn’t a dictator [...]
When I first started some years ago, the guy I worked for told me to prepare myself because this business is so often just stupid. It does make sense given the high stakes and pressure, where everybody is literally trying to outsmart everybody else every minute of every day. And those kinds of conditions, variable as they are, lead to [...]
Well, that was ugly. The lousy employment report released this past Friday threw the markets and probably the FOMC for a loop. Stocks didn't really do anything - yet - but other markets more than made up for that minor oversight. The dollar was down 1.5% on the week, all of that after 8:30 Friday morning. Gold was up 2.57% [...]
Why was the stock market down almost 6% last week? I know what you're thinking - has this guy been under a rock somewhere? But I'm serious. I know what all the pundits, commentators and talking heads are saying about the immediate cause. It's about the China devaluation and the knock on effect in other emerging markets. It's about global [...]
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