It’s been a little too on-the-nose. Claiming only a minimum level of dramatic license here, what we have continuing toward an uneasy future is a case of life imitating art (which imitated real life). We’ve all heard of Shakespeare’s famed soothsayer cautioning the arrogant Roman Emperor Caesar to watch his back on March 15. How about the 18th?Beware the Ides [...]
Of course inflation numbers, the PCE Deflators for June 2021, but first in the same report as those the BEA also released its various data on income and spending. In the former category, income, we’ll find a big reason why this deviation for consumer prices most likely ends up as temporary. And before we can get to that, big benchmark [...]
Ceremony and ritual are not just important concepts for priming and keeping faith, they are absolute essentials. There’s a reason why cult leaders make themselves appear - at every instance - indispensable while at the same time keeping their masses busy with nonsense. Can’t ever permit thinking too much lest the house of cards crash downward at the first slight [...]
The Federal Reserve has done us a solid favor by opening wide its RRP window. Quite by accident, obviously, these policymakers hardly useful monetary stewards, we now have another indication, and a more direct one (though still indirect overall), relating on the surface two seemingly very different factors. The correlation found there between T-bills and that has increased the visibility [...]
We’ve spent months in US Treasury bill yields for a (very good) reason. There’s brewing trouble out there, and it’s not just caught the attention of overeager indirects bidding in UST bill auctions. The premium for those instruments is a nod toward growing collateral scarcity, a deflationary potential that is almost certainly a big part, probably the key part, behind [...]
Searching for clues or even small collateral indications, you can’t leave out the gold market. We’ve been on the lookout for scarcity primarily via the T-bill market, and that’s a good place to start, yet looking back to last March the relationship between bills and bullion was uniquely strong. It’s therefore a persuasive pattern if or when it turns up [...]
I’m just going to post some brief comments on other parts of the TIC data. The major takeaway from the May 2021 update is what I wrote earlier, how what these figures show is both entirely consistent with what will be to most people a surprisingly long history as well as completely misconstrued in mainstream conversations (what few may take [...]
It’s not necessarily a discrepancy so much as maybe looking at the same thing from a different point of view. China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) reports on, among other things, the widest definition of foreign assets being under its whole national umbrella. Yet, the agency publishes balances denominated not in CNY, either US$’s or SDR’s (hey, they can [...]
Back on February 23, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell stopped by (in a virtual, Zoom sense) the Senate Banking Committee to testify as required by law. In the Q&A portion, he was asked the following by Montana’s Senator Steve Daines: SENATOR DAINES. I just was looking at the T bill chart and noticing since the 1st of February, the one [...]
Central bankers nearly everywhere have succumbed to recovery fever. This has been a common occurrence among their cohort ever since the earliest days of the crisis; the first one. Many of them, or their predecessors, since this standard of fantasyland has gone on for so long, had caught the malady as early as 2007 and 2008 when the world was [...]
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