Everyone knows the Titanic sank in April 1912, and if they didn’t they were reminded only a few years ago at its centennial. Less well known, for good reason, is the novel Futility, written by Morgan Robertson in 1898 years before Titanic had even been conceived. Robertson’s book includes the largest vessel ever constructed and he even offered it the [...]
When the June 2018 eurodollar futures price touched above 98.50 on October 2, I thought that was an impressive bid suggesting just how much negativity had survived the August liquidations. It was interrupted by some backward optimism about China’s October Golden Week, but the eurodollar curve overall with the June 2018 maturity as a specific interaction point for monetary policy [...]
It wasn’t in any way magnanimous for the FOMC to state clearly what everyone already knew without any need for aid of GDP calculations. The policy statement for its January 2016 meeting included language that mitigated, if not fully than significantly, the continued reliance on labor indications alone. The Fed says the labor market continues to point in the right [...]
US oil prices (WTI) ended 2014 at $53.45 spot. Since the decline to that point was thought be a temporary deviation, the fact that WTI ended 2015 at $37.07 is inconceivable to that perspective. The reasons for that were the unemployment rate and GDP. Payroll expansion had just fired up into the “best jobs market in decades” while GDP was [...]
There are a few correlations that I find particularly compelling. The first is Chinese RMB (or CNY) next to WTI crude oil, as both are proxies in their own way of multi-dimensional crosscurrents between global “dollar” finance and real economy function. Since March, that correlation has come into renewed and tight focus. In the past few days, the CNY has [...]
If the junk bond bubble was this week’s most visible inducement toward illiquidity, there have been more than enough indications that might corroborate and explain. With a few more days trading, the huge jump in BofAML’s CCC junk index rate has been confirmed – with another albeit smaller surge again yesterday. At now 16.74%, that is significantly above the prior [...]
The numbers all change with each month, but nothing really changes. And that includes how the economy changed in 2012 and clearly again in 2015. By raw count of the payroll figures, there were positive numbers in every location in the latest update as only full-time employment was close to zero growth (only +3k for November). The labor force grew [...]
The Fed has many problems with its attempt to convince the world that it has itself fulfilled its recovery mission. That self-reflected “mandate” is meant to include a masterful revisit to prior American infatuation with debt and credit. There was no more visible and visceral demonstration of those terms than the middle 2000’s, and it is the intent of monetary [...]
Janet Yellen and orthodox economists claim that the economy can only be gaining, and that word is taken, on faith, as if some updated, modern gold standard for meaning. No matter the contrary in actual evidence and observation, the “word” remains as if diktat were the only employ. It has produced some very strange dichotomies, particularly of late, where those [...]
In addition to indications for a gathering slowdown in export power Germany, the UK has followed a similar line of late. That would make sense since both Britain and Germany are essentially the same kind of economy separated slightly in geography and currency. They both make much of their growth from the same marginal space; financial services, exports to the [...]
Stay In Touch