Technically speaking, the rebound from the 2020 recession wasn’t strictly a supply shock. That was a huge part of it, no doubt, but a near-concurrent demand shock, if you will, also materialized. The combination of the two left the public bewildered, believing it an actual inflationary impasse which could only be further passed on into this year.Consumer prices did rise, [...]
It’s not hard to reason why there continues to be this conflict of interest (rates). On the one hand, impacting the short end of the yield curve, the unemployment rate has taken a tight grip on the FOMC’s limited imagination. The rate hikes are coming and the markets like all mainstream commentary agree that as it stands there’s nothing on [...]
Oil has easily, it appears, rebounded after having moved lower in November. It bottomed out that first big day of omicron fear on December 1 (ironically, or not, the same day the eurodollar futures curve inverted). Since a low of just over $65 (WTI), crude’s front futures price is easily back in the $80s thereby threatening to make January’s US [...]
It should be as simple as it sounds. Lower LT UST yields, less growth and inflation. Thus, higher LT UST yields, more growth and inflation. Right? If nominal levels are all there is to it, then simplicity rules the interpretation. Visiting with George Gammon last week, he confessed to committing this sin of omission. Rates have gone up, he reasoned [...]
The script has been flipped, so to speak, this time around. Whenever we’d go through one of those regular, alternating downturns worldwide, like the one which began right from the start of 2018, it was services which held up the increasingly troubled manufacturing sector. The variation for the swing, from globally synchronized growth to globally synchronized downturn, was mostly contained [...]
What is the consensus about the economy today? Will 2022 growth be better or worse than 2021? Actually, that probably isn't the right question because the economy slowed significantly in the second half of 2021. The real question is whether growth will improve from that reduced pace. The Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker now has Q4 growth all the way down [...]
I guess I took my own advice a little too literally. I did write that when the eurodollar futures curve first inverted, it was going to be dull. Didn’t start out that way, of course, with a small bit of theatrics right during that front week in December when the inversion first showed up. Ever since then, it has stuck [...]
The reason that store shelves are occasionally empty, as any social media hashtag trend will tell you, is that Americans are still buying an amazing amount of goods. For December 2021, Christmas was hardly canceled. The Census Bureau today reported that retailers during the biggest month of last year, of every year, grabbed an astoundingly huge $714 billion in overall [...]
Dark leverage, that’s the real stuff. In a ledger-based monetary system, money creation comes from expanding leverage. Simple. Clean. Obvious. How it gets done, that’s the genius, the beauty, and the disaster. Call it money of account, or ghost money, fictional currency, whatever. It’s the secret sauce which, when you see it, you just can’t un-see it. This is the [...]
How is that US Treasury rates out in the independent longer end of the yield curve have now “suffered” a seven percent CPI to go along with double taper and triple maybe quadruple (if the whispers are to be believed) rate hikes this year, yet have weathered all of that allegedly bond-busting brutality with barely a market fluctuation? The short [...]
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