The headlines last Friday were ominous: Inflation Hits Highest Level in Nearly 40 Years Inflation is Painfully High... Groceries and Christmas Presents Are Going To Cost More Inflation is Soaring.. America's Inflation Burst This morning on Face The Nation, Mohamed El-Erian, former Harvard endowment manager, former bond king apprentice, economist, and the man who seems to have a permanent presence [...]
The bond market is imploding, right? It has to be going by everything you hear. Did you know that the last two 30-year bond auctions had gone “awry”, as one mainstream news outlet put it? Another "media" shop declared them “catastrophic.”The second of those long bond sales was conducted just yesterday afternoon, right in time to run into the buzzsaw [...]
It hurts, so people want to know what to blame. Who should they punish for inflicting their pain? Enter human bias and the emotional processing of preconceived conclusions, “inflation” is no longer a topic which can be discussed rationally. A statistical weapon instead to be wielded attempting to settle other debates.Joe Biden did it. No, this is a Biden Boom, [...]
What was it that old Iowa cornfield movie said? If you build it, he will come. Well, this isn’t quite that, rather something more along the lines of: if you reopen it, some will come back to work. Not nearly as snappy, far less likely to sell anyone movie tickets, yet this other tagline might contribute much to our understanding [...]
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 [...]
I’m not saying it is the whole story, but it’s not just random coincidence, either. It can’t be. At each inflection point when the global eurodollar system rolls over from reflation to the next major funding squeeze, you will find the debt ceiling nonsense rolled on into that process. Every time. On September 8, 2017, the debt ceiling was temporarily [...]
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 [...]
There were all kinds of good news in the August payroll report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics would publish an acceleration in headline numbers, just about every one of them. The Establishment Survey “surged”, wage growth registered its largest annual increase in nearly a decade, while one broad measure of slack, U-6, tumbled to its lowest point since the start [...]
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: dollar up for reasons no one can explain; yield curve flattening dramatically resisting the BOND ROUT!!! everyone has said is inevitable; a very hawkish Fed increasingly certain about inflation risks; then, the eurodollar curve inverts which blasts Jay Powell’s dreamland in favor of the proper interpretation, deflation, of those first two. Twenty-eighteen, right? [...]
Flatter. The yield curve continues to shrink in the important middle calendar spaces where growth and inflation expectations run the place. Treasuries have been doing this since around March, a peculiar (given monolithic mainstream reporting otherwise) eight-month reign of growing pessimism rather than inflationary confidence. Did the market foresee omicron more than half a year ago? No. That’s not really [...]
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