Here we go again. Or maybe, more accurately, here we go still. COVID has reared its ugly head again, this time in the form of a new variant called Omicron. The name surprised some folks because the next letter in the Greek alphabet was Nu, but the WHO thought that sounded too much like "new" so they skipped that one, [...]
Bring on the tantrum. Forget this prevaricating, we should want and expect interest rates to get on with normalizing. It’s been a long time, verging to the insanity of a decade and a half already that keeps trending more downward through time. What’s the holdup? You can’t blame COVID at the tail end for a woeful string which actually dates [...]
The first half of 2021 was inundated with government helicopters, more QE’s, and then CPI’s put up with guarantees the “inflation” was going to continue for a long time. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s often hapless CEO, proudly declared US Treasuries beyond the touch of any 10-foot pole. With the economy on fire, he “reasoned”, who would ever want safe and [...]
Spend even a modest amount of time on the subject, and the distinct impression you are left with is that American ports and railyards are dealing with a truly epic jam because the economy has been so good there’s just too many goods for anyone to reasonably handle. Juiced by the federal government’s helicopters, Americans spent, spent some more, and [...]
We’ve got one central bank over here in America which appears as if its members can’t wait to “taper”, bringing up both the topic and using that particular word as much as possible. Jay Powell’s Federal Reserve obviously intends to buoy confidence by projecting as much when it does cut back on the pace of its (irrelevant) QE6. On the [...]
New orders, new orders, new orders. That’s the substance of the inventory cycle. A lot more of them, the upswing in it can remain intact keeping the global manufacturing economy humming along. Should they start to scale back and then, maybe at some point, decline, this unusual supply-constraint trend transitions toward a more historical inventory cycle on the downturn. As [...]
We are going to start here with Europe before heading to Australia and then getting to China – and then currency. Why the ECB? It is going through the same pangs of dissatisfaction as its cousin the Federal Reserve had last summer. Like the Fed in 2020, Europe’s central bank in 2021 has climbed to the end of its grand [...]
Europe’s statistical agency Eurostat reported today that its preliminary inflation estimates released earlier for the month of July 2021 had come out correct. Those first guesses had put the year-over-year change in the overall HICP at 2.2%, and its core rate one of the lowest at 0.7%. With more completed survey data and more time to recheck the statistics, confirming [...]
Germany’s flash July 2021 inflation estimate came in hot yesterday, boosted mostly by comparisons to July 2020’s VAT-free situation. That country’s CPI is a robust sounding 3.8% year-over-year this month, though only 3.1% in its flash HICP terms. Despite Deutschland’s oversized contribution and influence, Eurostat reports today how for Europe as a whole there was a whole lot of little [...]
When the ECB’s leadership presented their first QE to the assembled media on March 5, 2015, there was a lot of the usual corporate-speak. It sure wasn’t fedspeak, the purposefully obfuscating wordsmithing of the kind made infamous by Alan Greenspan. No, on this occasion, to the contrary, Mario Draghi, the ECB’s President, wanted to be perfectly clear in what he [...]
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