Janet Yellen threaded the needle this week with a masterfully worded statement following the FOMC meeting. The word "patient", the removal of which had produced so much angst in markets recently, was excised to appease the hawks while the rest of the statement cooed dovishly to appease the stock market bulls. The Fed finally acknowledged reality and downgraded their economic [...]
The issue of bank hoarding has become nearly mainstream as the size of the move into UST is now too large to ignore. It wasn’t so much an issue last year, apparently, as there was less to suggest taking very pessimistic portfolio allocations was anything other than an anomaly of regulation. This year the idea of prudence as opposed to [...]
The FOMC has been talking, so we hear, about changing “forward guidance” to indicate a potential rate hike sooner rather than later. They had already changed the basis of “forward guidance” back in September which largely negated what forward guidance actually meant. The concept is only pliable in the manner in which monetary theory has to follow “rational expectations.” Whenever [...]
It is often very easy to fixate on the S&P 500 as if it were the only current proxy of the broad universe of stocks. Like the Dow Jones Industrial Average before it, the 500 has attained synonymy with stocks as it is the most widely publicized and recognized value. But just like the DJIA, the index has its own [...]
Despite the relative peace and tranquility in dollar-denominated credit markets at present, the “dollar” itself continues to rise. Clearly the acceleration of that trend has waned in recent weeks, but nonetheless is still moving upward to the point it is at the highest level in more than a decade. Somehow most commentary takes such a massive and sustained move in [...]
Stocks had a great day today unshaken by whether the manufacturing part of the economy was growing more quickly or at the slowest rate in 13 months. Confusion isn’t part of the asset inflation lexicon. In economic news, the U.S. manufacturing sector had its best gains since October, according to Markit's final Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index that rose to 55.1 [...]
The last time I commented on the Chicago Business Barometer (formerly the Chicago PMI) it was over a one-month drop that was quickly erased. That violated a personal rule whereby I make every effort to ignore sentiment surveys as they both do not mean what they are taken for and are usually of dubious value. The reason I commented then [...]
I think the ongoing destruction in the Japanese Household sector demonstrates very well a specific shortcoming about economic statistics like GDP. The basic calculation of the particular measure that forms the headlines of almost all commentary is a comparison of the current quarter to the previous one. That right away opens the door to incongruities as there remain very definite [...]
Say what you want about the CPI as it relates to inflation, the actual calculation is set up to measure essentially what GDP measures. That is why economists take their calculations of “inflation” as almost literal substitutes for actual economic activity. There is little denying the close correlation between economic activity especially in recession and the dramatic slides in CPI [...]
Yesterday in trying describe Janet Yellen’s testimony to Congress about the economy, pundits apparently were forced to concede that the “data won’t cooperate”, thus leaving the economy in Yellen’s head to be wholly different than anything described elsewhere outside the media echoes. Today’s release of durable goods provides yet another data point that “will not cooperate” with the dreamland of [...]
Stay In Touch