The US Census Bureau today reported that US imports of goods and services reached a record monthly high of $290.7 billion in October 2021. Just goods alone, the figure was $241.1 billion, which was 11% greater than the previous peak set way back in October 2018. With (questionable) media accounts continuing to highlight West Coast port traffic, there may not [...]
This wasn’t meant to be a running tally. In fact, that was my major point in yesterday’s curve inversion missive; the thing inverted, it stayed inverted for a second day but maybe won’t change much for some time moving forward. Boring and consistent, what matters most in this first stage is only that the inversion sticks rather than expecting big [...]
It’s always a balance of probabilities tug-of-war. Markets (not stocks) are continuously trying to discern risk since everything is really converted to some kind of risk-adjusted basis. And if the perceived weight of those tilts downward thinking forward, then it may not matter much or at all what’s going on right now.What’s going on right now is, according to everyone, [...]
When Japan’s Ministry of Trade, Economy, and Industry (METI) reported earlier in November that Japanese Industrial Production (IP) had plunged again during the month of September 2021, it was so easy to just dismiss the decline as a product of delta COVID. According to these figures, industrial output fell an unsightly 5.4%...from August 2021, meaning month-over-month not year-over-year. Altogether, IP [...]
The bond market’s verdict has already been rendered. In fact, the judgment was made even before this year’s CPIs surged to the highest they’d been in a long time. The most consistently accurate and only historically validated source for sorting and signaling inflation, low yields aren’t just skeptical in being low they are unequivocal in remaining steadfastly ultra-low.For those who [...]
While most people were still digesting the headline US BLS report and its unemployment rate’s latest dip on Friday, over in Germany a few hours before the American release the other country’s economic bean counters at deStatis had already published some puzzling, seemingly inconsistent data. Measuring total industrial output, Industrial Production, the Germans said theirs had declined by a substantial [...]
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 [...]
Do the similarities outweigh the differences? We better hope not. There is a lot about 2021 that is shaping up in the same way as 2018 had (with a splash of 2013 thrown in for disgust). Guaranteed inflation, interest rates have nowhere to go but up, and a certified rocking recovery restoring worldwide potential. So said all in the media, [...]
Forgotten now, overridden by the arrival of the coronavirus, Germany’s economy was already well into recession before COVID. Quite a long time before. It wasn’t an earth-shattering collapse reaching downward to an incredible depth, that became the later effect of overreacting to the pandemic. We will simply never know what that prior contraction would have looked like, and how bad [...]
By the summer of 2018, there were already any number of economic warning signs over globally synchronized growth fading fast. Many if not most of them market-based, of course, but not all. In the realm of sentiment, for example, the Germans in particular had put their finger on the pulse of the global economy and found it suspiciously feeble, economic [...]
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