Is there anyone left out there who doesn't know the rate of economic growth is slowing? The 10-year Treasury yield has fallen 45 basis points since peaking in mid-March. 10-year TIPS yields have fallen by the same amount and now reside below -1% again. Copper prices peaked a little later (early May), fell 16% at the recent low, and are [...]
Count retail sales (US) among the dead data. Like recent CPI’s and PPI’s, consumer spending on goods continues to be sky high – and yet markets (even stocks) don’t seem to care. For the month of June 2021, the Census Bureau believes total sales were up when compared to May, though not much as May’s estimate was revised lower. At [...]
I find it very uncomfortable to be in such agreement with monetary policy officials like Jay Powell. He and I both look at the inflation data, for example, and have come to the same conclusion that these consumer, producer, and commodity price deviations won’t last; though we arrive at our same view coming from very different use of analysis.Today, the [...]
Three in a row, huge CPI gains. According to the BLS, headline consumer price inflation surged 5.39% (unadjusted) year-over-year during June 2021. This was another month at the highest since July 2008 (the last transitory inflationary episode). The core CPI rate gained 4.47% last month over June last year, the biggest since November 1991. More impressive (or worrisome, depending upon [...]
Until last week you hadn't heard much about the bond market rally. I told you we were probably near a rally way back in early April when the 10-year was yielding around 1.7%. And I told you in mid-April that the 10-year yield could fall all the way back to the 1.2 to 1.3% range. The bond rally since April [...]
Yield curve control, remember that one? For a little while earlier this year, the modestly reflationary selloff in bonds around the world was prematurely oversold as some historically significant beginning to a massive, conclusive regime change. Inflation had finally been achieved across multiple geographies, it was widely repeated, and this would create problems, purportedly, as these various places would have [...]
Quirks or kinks in the eurodollar futures curve are nothing new, materializing from time to time as much for technical reasons as anything else. Still, there are those instances – such as June 2018 – when these represent meaningful changes in outlook and condition. Back in the middle of that year, the sudden inversion in the curve along the 2020-21 [...]
Six months ago, the US was still reporting 226K new cases of COVID a day, a rate that would peak in the first half of January at over 300k. Daily deaths also peaked in those first two weeks of the new year at over 4000. The economy was still struggling to recover, most restaurants surviving on takeout traffic, and no [...]
Does anyone remember the SLR “cliff?” Of course you don’t, because in the end it didn’t seem to make any difference. For a few weeks, it was kind of ubiquitous if only in the sense that it was another one of those deep plumbing issues no one seems able to understand (forcing all the “experts” to run to Investopedia in [...]
Back at the end of May, Germany’s statistical accounting agency (deStatis) added another one to the inflationary inferno raging across the mainstream media. According to its flash calculations, German consumer prices last month had increased by the fastest rate in 13 years. Even using the European “harmonized” methodology (Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, or HICP), inflation had reached 2.4% year-over-year [...]
Stay In Touch