I suppose it’s only fair. After all, they started it. Earlier in the year, Federal Reserve officials including Chairman Jay Powell suggested it was all Trump’s fault. The abrupt difficulties presented by the dollar were, they said, the result of tax cuts swelling the deficit and thereby threatening capital markets with a “deluge” of Treasury bills to digest. This past [...]
BNP Paribas is apparently calling for an epic rout in German bunds. According to Bloomberg (who else?) it’s a mini-revival of Bill Gross’ ill-fated tweet advertising the “short of a lifetime.” In April 2015, the man many called the bond king said it was going to be better than the pound in 1993. https://twitter.com/JHIAdvisorsUS/status/590519759797530624 Gross advertised waiting until later in [...]
At some point, the boom had to have boomed. We are moving into the past tense for all this now, inflation hysteria almost certainly tucked away into the economic ledger alongside four other false dawns. Data is coming in for June 2018, meaning half of this year already recorded and analyzed. It’s not what it was supposed to have been. [...]
Whether we notice them or not, there are a lot of things that do happen on a seasonal basis. Economists have tried to eliminate these patterns from our thoughts and analysis largely by smoothing them out with seasonal adjustments. But in money as markets there remain these bottlenecks. People have asked me from time to time why I use the [...]
We ended last week on a pretty sour note. The eurodollar futures curve has inverted ever so slightly, which isn’t a very good sign of things to come. Since the inversion has to do with different pressures pressing on different parts, convention pays all attention only to the front. It’s there where the Federal Reserve acts out its forecasts. Because [...]
The eurodollar futures curve has already turned on them. That’s why the sudden interest in things like federal funds futures. If it seemed yesterday with the release of the last meeting minutes that the FOMC members appear to be getting nervous, there is good reason. The eurodollar curve is already slightly inverted. Remember, these contracts deal with probabilities and distributions [...]
Since LIBOR is a hot topic again, though no 2a7 in sight, I thought I’d add one additional perspective that isn’t found in any other analysis. LIBOR is, of course, a money rate applied not to domestic funding but eurodollars on offer in London. The current criticism of the rate stems from the fact that there isn’t volume in unsecured [...]
For the end-of-bond-bull-market-crowd, 3% is a line in the sand. There is no inherent significance in that number, except that it’s a round one. The benchmark 10s as of now trade with regard to that level as if it’s a ceiling. That’s what makes it so momentous. In 2013, the yield finally broke 3% the day after Christmas, getting as [...]
It’s always been easy to lose perspective. In the modern social media age, maybe it has become even easier. Conventional wisdom rarely seems to get challenged anymore, particularly given the assignment of “what everybody knows.” Big Data is, for example, predicated on a very good theory, the wisdom of crowds. It hasn’t yet lived up to its expectations because as [...]
It used to be a big deal, the kind of move that would itself move markets all over the world. Very quietly, JPY has been trading higher over recent weeks and has reached a level of appreciation we haven’t seen since those rocky days in early September. Only then, a rising yen (falling dollar) was a sign of bad things, [...]
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