There wasn’t anything new or surprising in the advance durable goods report. Shipments (ex transportation) were flat and orders were up 1% year-over-year (NSA). Capital goods (non-defense, ex aircraft) shipments fell 3.4%, the tenth straight month of contraction, while new orders were down again (2.6%) for the sixteenth time out of the past nineteen months. The slump only continues. With [...]
Last week, the St. Louis Fed published an article based on a speech that Dr. Larry Summers gave to the Homer Jones Memorial Lecture series back in April. The article included the full text of Summers’ speech and importantly the supporting material and evidence he used in his argument for “secular stagnation.” Included is one chart that is among the [...]
On June 14, the 10-year German bund yield traded briefly below zero for the first time. It was an inauspicious record but one that defines the contradictions at the center of all this economic and monetary controversy. On the one hand, that is what central banks tell us they are after especially with QE, to reduce interest rates even at [...]
With the sudden interjection of uncertainty halting the surge in Brexit odds since the unfortunate attack on British MP Jo Cox last week, the financial world has benefitted from the pound’s resurrection. Sterling has had a very good couple of days in this reversal, especially today. As it rises it adds the same as we saw on the day of [...]
This is all starting to look very familiar and predictably so: Especially this: It is utterly extraordinary that the June 2023 eurodollar futures contract closed trading at 98.00, much less than on February 11 and a collapse of more than 150 bps in anticipated 3M LIBOR seven years in the future just since last July. It is, again, entirely anticipated given the [...]
The Treasury International Capital (TIC) update for April showed a very large net decline in foreign (registered) holdings of US securities. The total net drop was $68.7 billion, the largest in one month since the severe “dollar warning” in June 2013. Though we have become accustomed to these kinds of results, the biggest factor in April 2016 was on the [...]
With stocks down for a second day, attention has been focused on the UK vote potentially in favor of leaving the EU. It seems like a naturally disruptive event, or at least in theory, an outcome that the mainstream globalist persuasion continues to emphasize. That is certainly one possible explanation, but a more likely scenario is one where CNY plays [...]
In August 2013, the Treasury Department through its Treasury International Capital data (TIC) put a scale on that summer’s disruption. With a two month delay, the TIC figures gave us some insight as to why the fixed income/MBS selloff that summer was so violent; and further why it had so easily spread to currency markets. The destabilization of that event [...]
It makes for yet another huge dichotomy, but one which is curiously absent from any mainstream commentary. As noted earlier today, Chinese imports were pleasantly surprising for the mainstream as they were just about flat year-over-year. The fact that oil imports surged by nearly 40% seemed only to confirm that whatever might be happening on the export side (another dichotomy [...]
To the surprise of no one, the Chinese yuan on Monday picked back up where it left off last week with Friday’s big move only shifting the level from which it now sinks. Straight from the Asian open, CNY quickly traded lower and settled again closer to 6.57. If it exposes Friday’s reversal as a one-day, knee-jerk reaction then it [...]
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