For the past couple months, the foreign official sector has been able to go back to buying (net) US Treasuries again. Not a lot, but it’s a change from the prior period when overseas central banks and governments would dependably dump tens of billions each month. Contrary to convention, this kind of buying corresponds to rising rates, the reflationary stuff. [...]
Their experience with COVID has been different in each case. Their response to the outbreak and pandemic hardly uniform. Mexico, for example, has reported 855,000 cases of the coronavirus from which more than 86,000 have died (or were found to have the disease when they died). Japan, on the other hand, just 93,000 cases with only 1,600 fatalities. We all [...]
The dominating feature during the last months and days of globally synchronized growth (Reflation #3, to you and me) wasn’t inflation nor growth. It was instead CNY. Taken at face value, the marvelous resurrection of China’s currency after 2014-16’s debacle (Euro$ #3, to you and me) did seem consistent with a global dollar system (eurodollar, to you and me) rebound.And [...]
For awhile there, a few weeks anyway, the 30-year US Treasury long bond had become the star of the mainstream show. Showered with its 15 minutes of fame, everyone loved how, for once, it seemed to agree with Jay Powell and the preferred narrative about the effectiveness of his technocracy. The idiocy of this attention was exposed by just how [...]
The boom never boomed. That’s what made the bond and money curves so flat in 2018. The data, the real economy behind the numbers, never matched the rhetoric. Even GDP. We’re in much the same position today, only starting from much weaker and worse. The rhetoric is still positive, except now it’s about a turnaround. But, and this is the [...]
Yesterday, Eurostat confirmed that German GDP in Q2 2019 had contracted. Also issuing benchmark revisions, the European government agency found that GDP growth had been slightly better than previously thought at the top of Reflation #3. The last two quarters of 2017 saw the biggest upward revisions. But if Europe’s “boom” really was a little closer to having been a [...]
One reason why Japanese bond yields are approaching records like their German counterparts is the global economy indicated in Japan’s economic accounts. As in Germany, Japan is an outward facing system. It relies on the concept of global growth for marginal changes. Therefore, if the global economy is coming up short, we’d see it in Japan first and maybe best. [...]
The FOMC hates the bond market. Hates everything about it, especially how it tells these Economists they don’t know what they are doing. Monetary policy being little more than a vanity project, that’s not going to work for the people practicing it. OK, if you don’t like bonds then how about something else besides the stock market? Some independent corroboration [...]
Early in May 2013, the word “taper” exploded into the mainstream. It was everywhere, scarcely an article written or news story pieced together which hadn't included the term (even though Ben Bernanke never actually said it). The so-called tantrum spread like wildfire simply because of what it represented, the very thing everyone had been waiting for. Confirmation at last the [...]
In January 2017, there was a lot of praise for Goldman Sachs especially in London. This stood in obvious contrast to another global peer being savaged. While Deutsche Bank couldn’t pull its name out of the sewer, GS’s London unit was heralded for standing up when the market needed it. Brexit was a fascinating story in ways that had absolutely [...]
Stay In Touch