Count retail sales (US) among the dead data. Like recent CPI’s and PPI’s, consumer spending on goods continues to be sky high – and yet markets (even stocks) don’t seem to care. For the month of June 2021, the Census Bureau believes total sales were up when compared to May, though not much as May’s estimate was revised lower. At [...]
These are not the numbers to put anyone’s (rational) mind at ease. China’s data dump wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t need to be in order to amplify concerns about the state of the global economy. What the inflationary case required of the Chinese government instead was unambiguous, inarguable acceleration more consistent with the idea its economy is somehow performing up [...]
I find it very uncomfortable to be in such agreement with monetary policy officials like Jay Powell. He and I both look at the inflation data, for example, and have come to the same conclusion that these consumer, producer, and commodity price deviations won’t last; though we arrive at our same view coming from very different use of analysis.Today, the [...]
And just like that, snap of the fingers, it’s gone. Without a “bad” Treasury auction, there was no stopping the bond market today from retracing all of yesterday’s (modest) selloff and then some. This despite the huge CPI estimates released before the prior session’s trading, and now PPI figures that are equally if not more obscene. The BLS reports today [...]
Three in a row, huge CPI gains. According to the BLS, headline consumer price inflation surged 5.39% (unadjusted) year-over-year during June 2021. This was another month at the highest since July 2008 (the last transitory inflationary episode). The core CPI rate gained 4.47% last month over June last year, the biggest since November 1991. More impressive (or worrisome, depending upon [...]
So much going on this week in the bond market, it actually overshadowed the ridiculous noise coming from the Fed’s reverse repo. Some maybe too many want to make a huge deal out of this RRP if only because the numbers associated with it have gotten so big. To end Q2 2021, financial counterparties “lent” just about $1 trillion to [...]
Yield curve control, remember that one? For a little while earlier this year, the modestly reflationary selloff in bonds around the world was prematurely oversold as some historically significant beginning to a massive, conclusive regime change. Inflation had finally been achieved across multiple geographies, it was widely repeated, and this would create problems, purportedly, as these various places would have [...]
Quirks or kinks in the eurodollar futures curve are nothing new, materializing from time to time as much for technical reasons as anything else. Still, there are those instances – such as June 2018 – when these represent meaningful changes in outlook and condition. Back in the middle of that year, the sudden inversion in the curve along the 2020-21 [...]
The 30-year US Treasury bond yield dipped below 2% today for the first time since early February. The unsurprising nasty “surprise” in the ISM combined with more concerning data especially surrounding China released over the long American holiday weekend have added more weight to fears the global economy has reached the limits of reopening. If we’ve already seen its best [...]
Does anyone remember the SLR “cliff?” Of course you don’t, because in the end it didn’t seem to make any difference. For a few weeks, it was kind of ubiquitous if only in the sense that it was another one of those deep plumbing issues no one seems able to understand (forcing all the “experts” to run to Investopedia in [...]
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