The risk budget is unchanged this month. For the moderate risk investor the allocation to bonds and risk assets is evenly split. There are changes this month within the asset classes. How far are we from the end of this cycle? When will the next recession arrive and more importantly when will stocks and other markets start to anticipate a [...]
It’s not quite yet on the level of October 15, 2014, but it’s not really that far off, either. What made the prior episode three and a half years ago unique was the condensed timeframe, as well as how far UST yields fell. Today has been a far steadier “flight to safety”, meaning the same thing just spread out over [...]
When we last left off with the TIC data, the figures showed pretty clearly Japan’s retreat from “dollar” dealing during January and February. Global liquidations occurred during January and February. Therefore, it was reasonable to speculate upon Japanese origins of those liquidations. That wasn’t the only interesting development revealed by TIC. Over in Hong Kong, there was a surge in [...]
I believe if you were to ask most people their definition of the worst economic case, they would respond with some description of a crash. An exceedingly large contraction that spares practically no one, destroying much in its path. Like what followed 1929, that would seem to qualify. It’s why we spend so much time going back to 2008. That [...]
Back in February, Japan’s Cabinet Office reported that Real GDP in Japan had grown in Q4 2017 for the eighth consecutive quarter. It was the longest streak of non-negative GDP since the 1980’s. Predictably, this was hailed as some significant achievement, a true masterstroke of courage and perseverance. It was taken as a sign that Abenomics and QQE was finally [...]
The risk budget changes this month as I add back the 5% cash raised in late October. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation to bonds is still 50% while the risk side now rises to 50% as well. I raised the cash back in late October due to the extreme overbought nature of the stock market and frankly it [...]
For all its tortured economic history since 1989, Japan has never really had an unemployment problem. Going by its unemployment rate alone, conditions don’t ever appear to be all that out of line. At its worst, in both the dot-com recession as well as Japan’s experience during the Great “Recession”, the highest it ever got was 5.5%. That’s more than [...]
File it under the things they wish you would never find out. On March 25, 2003, two years into what was supposed to be a temporary intervention, the Bank of Japan gathered for another policy meeting to discuss what they might do. They had launched the world’s first ZIRP in February 1999, ended it August 2000 with a “rate hike”, [...]
No one seems able to account for the rise in LIBOR-OIS. I think it’s a vain effort, and focuses on the wrong segments, but nonetheless there is considerable uncertainty which always casts suspicions into the shadows. That is important. A few weeks ago, all the big bank analysts were alight with their theories. They couldn’t agree, as noted in this [...]
Thomas Hoenig was President of the Federal Reserve’s Kansas City branch for two decades. He left that post in 2011 to become Vice Chairman of the FDIC. Before that, Mr. Hoenig as a voting member of the FOMC in 2010 cast the lone dissenting vote in each of the eight policy meetings that year (meaning he was against QE2, too). [...]
Stay In Touch