I’ve seen a lot of commentary lately describe conditions as if things are calmed down. There was a bit of growth scare, a little T-bill indigestion earlier in the year. The Chinese are somehow both stimulating their export sector by devaluing CNY, and also controlling the price of gold while they do it. The contradictory inflation/deflation signals have apparently just [...]
Why did Treasury bonds selloff on Wednesday? Obviously, we can’t ever know for sure why markets move the way they do especially in the shortest timeframes. Still, that won’t stop us from speculating anyway. The 10-year UST yield spiked just above 3% in early trading Wednesday morning. This particular drive began the night before. Treasury futures had been flat for [...]
The entire purpose of China’s presumed rebalancing act is supposedly that the country’s economy will no longer be strongly linked to industry. Manufacturing, for export in particular, is what made modern China into an economic powerhouse, transforming a once agrarian subsistence society (thanks to socialism). One need only look at overhead or satellite images of those cities chosen as special [...]
Argentina has had a good month of July. When last we checked toward the end of June, the peso was still plummeting. It would nearly close below 29, an absolutely astounding drop that made plain this wasn’t devaluation as “stimulus.” That plus the whole record IMF bailout and the immediate dollar funding that came with it. That was June 7, [...]
There are two components to economic demand: willingness and ability. The two factors work only in tandem. We all want to buy our own private islands stocked with the most obscene amenities yet invented, but none of us are able to put together the down payment for such an insane venture. The demand for ultra-wealthy living is high in fantasy, [...]
There is a huge difference between believing in gold and believing in the gold business. The former is about wanting a stable, dependable global monetary system, one very much like what survived thousands of years of history without a whole lot of changes to it. The latter is about convincing you who are likely to believe the same thing to [...]
We are closing in on a record for economic expansion. It’s been talked about more frequently, especially since one has already been reached in the labor market. According to the BLS, there hasn’t been a negative employment report since September 2010 (there was one in September last year, but it has since been revised to slightly positive). That’s 93 consecutive [...]
In 1962, physicist Wolfgang Panofsky finally obtained funding from the Atomic Energy Commission. As a faculty member at Stanford University he wanted the federal government to fund his monster. Dubbed Project M, for monster, Dr. Panofsky was seeking a method for scientists to obtain evidence for what was really going on inside the atom. The project was really a linear [...]
In 1999, real GDP growth in the United States was 4.69% (Q4 over Q4). In 1998, it was 4.9989%. These were annual not quarterly rates, meaning that for two years straight GDP expanded by better than 4.5%. Individual quarters within those years obviously varied, but at the end of the day the economy was clearly booming. It also helped that [...]
When I write, as I did again yesterday, Brazil may already be toast it’s not just Brazil who is likely to be on the painful end of the eurodollar. The balance of probability says that this one unfortunate South American country is potentially going to suffer more than most, for a second time, but they will not be unique in [...]
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