Is it over? That’s the question everyone is asking about both major crises, the answer is more obvious for only the one. As it pertains to the pandemic, no, it is not. Still the early stages. The other crisis, the global dollar run? Not looking like it, either. Stocks rebounded because of “major helicopter stimulus” or because that’s just what [...]
We certainly don’t have a crystal ball at the ready, and we can’t predict the future. The best we might hope is to entertain reasonable probabilities for it oftentimes derived from how we see the past. Which is just what statistics and econometrics attempt. Except, wherein they go wrong we don’t have to make their mistakes. For example, in the [...]
The fact that the mainstream isn’t taking this all very seriously isn’t anything new. But how serious are things really? That’s pretty much the only question anyone should be asking. What are the curves telling us about what’s now just over the horizon? I hesitate to use 2008 comparisons too often because many people immediately jump to extrapolations, especially in [...]
When the eurodollar futures curve first inverted a year ago in the wake of May 29, 2018, it was the market beginning to hedge against serious and rising risks of something that would force the Federal Reserve to turn around. When that might happen, or how many cuts would eventually follow, those were questions the immediate inversion couldn’t answer. All [...]
Tomorrow will be one year since the global monetary system broke. Or, for the sake of accuracy, broke again this for the fourth time. There had been warnings going all the way back to September 2017 about how all was not right in the realm of reserve currency. These would take on added importance at the outset of 2018, an [...]
In Europe, the ECB’s minutes for its April 2019 meeting claimed: Financial market developments, which were typically more forward looking, were more upbeat. In the US, the Federal Reserve’s minutes for its April 2019 meeting claimed: Participants noted that even if global economic and financial conditions continued to improve, a patient approach would likely remain warranted, especially in an environment [...]
People have started to look back fondly upon the Asian flu. It was as global disaster, a dollar shortage which spread all across mostly Asia but not exclusively. The reason why it is talked about positively nowadays is LTCM and rate cuts. Popular myth has it that Greenspan’s Fed properly handled any economic fallout due to the former by enacting [...]
In the middle of last November, when the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve convened a conference on “global perspectives”, ironically, its officials were in a very good mood. The institution’s Chairman, Jay Powell, invited to speak at the gathering spelled out exactly why. Central bankers since Greenspan have made a habit of trying to say very little, but Powell [...]
Real GDP growth in the United States during the first quarter of 2019 was much better than expected. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates that total economic output expanded by 3.12272% in Q1 over Q4 2018. Most analysts were expecting somewhere around 2.3% to 2.5%. Considering mounting uncertainties and growing fears, in the face of a lot of increasingly [...]
Nothing will ever compare to China’s New Year Golden Week holiday for challenging economic statistics. Since the celebrations are not affixed to a specific point on the calendar, floating around back and forth some years between January and February, it makes making comparisons of those months particularly tricky. For the China’s Big 3 statistics, industrial production, retail sales, and fixed [...]
Stay In Touch