The title is a shorthand way of saying that the most recent performance of the economy isn't predictive of the future performance of the stock market. The bottom line is that GDP growth today doesn't necessarily mean stock price growth today - GDP growth and stock returns are not highly correlated. In fact, some analysis suggests that they are negatively [...]
If we have learned anything from this period in economic and financial history, it should have been to take great care when using or expecting past correlations as valid. There are innumerable examples where that dynamic shift applies, but it seems especially relevant at the end of April 2015. The amount of space and pixels dedicated to the idea that [...]
2015 has started with a bang with the Dow trading in a roughly 700 point range through the first six trading days. The increase in volatility started in the 4th quarter and appears to have entered the new year with a new - higher - range. The source of the volatility appears to be angst about the health of the [...]
co·nun·drum - noun: A confusing or difficult problem; a question or problem having only a conjectural answer Merriam-Webster Back in the last Fed tightening cycle, Alan Greenspan described the refusal of long term rates to follow short rates higher a conundrum, something he couldn't really explain. Unlike past periods of tightening, long term rates refused to budge higher as the [...]
As if it needed further clarification, the FOMC has gone its own way publicly against pretty much everything else because there is no other course that could even possibly end Hollywood-style. The constant reference to “slack” in the labor market is what gives this away. A potential reduction in labor slack would mean emphasis on inflation rather than unemployment. However, [...]
Yesterday, in the wake of some intense credit market drama, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard acknowledged the obvious. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Bullard showed just how upside down these “markets” have become. “Inflation expectations are dropping in the U.S., and that is something that a central bank cannot abide,” Mr. Bullard said. Referring to the process of [...]
Janet Yellen began the debate, loosely termed, when she classified recent CPI and other measures of price changes as “noisy.” That created sort of an odd wedge between the FOMC policymaking orthodoxy and the wider set of orthodox economists that typically share the same exact dispositions on everything (especially since one feeds the other). The former “need” such badly calibrated [...]
Henry Hazlitt once wrote that, “it is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths.” I have come to wonder how far that might have penetrated, disabling so many of the tools in which any “good” economists, or even investors, may use to act. Without the free [...]
Despite all the fireworks in the treasury market at the end of May, the gripping stasis in inflation trading remained undeterred by the round trip. We have passed into the eleventh consecutive month of such dearth, an absolutely astounding stretch unmatched by anything since TIPS were introduced in 2003. At this point it becomes a race to see how long [...]
What is a "widowmaker"? Merriam Webster defines it as "something dangerous to a worker's life or health". More specifically the term comes from the logging industry and describes a loose limb hanging high in a tree that falls on and kills a logger. On Wall Street for the last 25 years or so, it has had a somewhat different meaning. [...]
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