This sour/soar stuff goes back many years. The last time we went through the same hysteria (if for different reasons), everyone said the global economy was going to accelerate, take off, and sail onward forever after. The world was, they all claimed, set to soar.Globally synchronized growth. The bond market didn’t just disagree, it did so vehemently, a pessimism when [...]
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 [...]
Where is the “tantrum?” If there is one, to this point it has been historically minor changes limited to the shorter end of the yield curve between the 2-year and 5-year USTs. This section of it is more influenced by what the market believes Jay Powell’s Fed will do especially now that it likely will be Jay Powell’s Fed for [...]
At first, it was taken as a sign of relief, of strength and the return of good fortune. So many massive ships each overloaded with containers stacked skyward above their beams were headed to the West Coast, the ports there couldn’t handle the traffic. The boats, and the massive cargoes they carried, themselves packed into a sort of wondrously fascinating [...]
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 [...]
The TIC data is great, it’s fantastic and wonderful if by comparison to the utterly slim pickings available elsewhere – which is practically nil. Compared to what I’d really like to know, the series leaves a ton out there. This is understandable if still unforgivable; on the one hand, the Treasury International Capital report itself predates the eurodollar system by [...]
Christmas came early for retailers already experiencing a boom year. This, however, creates a bit of conundrum given that producers have suffered rather than flourished despite such great fortune at the top of the supply chain. In whichever location you look at, production has been at best questionable.Why?Theories abound. The mainstream is filled with those like what’s been reported as [...]
Milton Friedman was touring India, and while there he shocked his audience by stating, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” This was 1963, and the audacity of that statement is today understated. Back then, Keynes didn’t just rule there was hardly any opposition to such accepted orthodox dogma.Arguing from firmly empirical rather than theoretical grounds, Friedman’s effort was [...]
Consumer sentiment hit a decade low last month, falling 6 points from an already low level. The culprit? Inflation, which we learned last week hit a 3 decade high in October. And if the founder of the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is right, the next thing we'll see is an economic slowdown. George Katona was a psychologist who [...]
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