The post-Pfizer vaccine rush pushed most of the contango out of the WTI futures curve. The aftermath of the Georgia Senate vote, and with it dreams of even larger, more carefree fiscal “stimulus”, drained all the rest. As of this week, the entire crude curve is once more contango-free; backwardation front to back.The physical markets have been able to fundamentally [...]
The company isn’t bankrupt, it just doesn’t have the right currency in its reach to repay debts coming due. YPF is Argentina’s (former) gold mine, in this case the black gold of energy exploitation. State-owned, the business has obviously close ties to the ruling powers-that-be and a privileged place to go along with them. Its formal name, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, [...]
If you tally up the amount of local government debt and add it to the total owed by Japan’s central government, at the close of fiscal year 1991 it wasn’t too bad. The Japanese had always been fiscally responsible especially when compared to any of that nation’s big economy peers. In those early days of the “lost decade”, the balance [...]
They were never very specific to begin with, even in Ben Bernanke’s infamous November 2010 Post op-ed covering the start of QE2. Officials like to keep it purposefully vague as a kind of dry powder, a margin for error. If bureaucrats become too specific, the public would reasonably hold them to their own standard being laid out. The point behind [...]
Is there a difference between inflation or reflation, and whatever this is? Not mere semantics, it may be everything for what the future ultimately looks like. Yet, the only one ever talked about is the first, as if a foregone conclusion. Why?We’re conditioned to believe in only one or the other, recession still contracting or otherwise total recovery, on top [...]
It was late on a Tuesday night, in the middle of last week, Christmas week of all weeks, with most people already checked out. Having finally obtained Congressional support and approval, the $900 billion plus “stimulus” (read: stipend) was on its way to becoming reality after months of politically-motivated uncertainty. Not one to sit idly by while everyone else had [...]
Lehman Brothers was a cultural marker, the kind of thing that sticks for generations because of all the wrong reasons. Hardly anyone had heard of the investment bank throughout its unbelievably long history stretching back to the middle of the 1840’s (yes, eighteen forties). But being near the center of a multi-generational breakdown causing as yet-untold damage and misery extending [...]
Since we highlighted the action in T-bills yesterday and the day before, it’s worth at least mentioning what TIC had to say about the instruments. Foreigners had been reducing their holdings of them not out of growing distaste but rather the opposite. There’s not nearly as many of them, not enough for what’s demanded, the Treasury Department quite purposefully (and [...]
It has happened more frequently the past few days. The difference between the equivalent yield for the 6-month (26-week) Treasury bill and its cousin with a 1-year (52-week) maturity has turned negative. You have to watch for it intraday, catching it flipping occasionally back and forth by fractions. After hours more than regular trading.Inversion, in other words. That dirty term [...]
They really got carried away, though in the context of that time there seemed any number of legitimate reasons for this. Gold investors were bidding up the precious metal like there was some kind of shortage, the price in dollars making a new record high (LBMA morning fix) on August 7. The way it was reported in the mainstream, this [...]
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