It was only near the quarter end, that’s what made it so unnerving. We may have become used to these calendar bottlenecks over the years, but they still remind us what they are. Late October 2012 was a little different, though. On October 29, the GC repo rate for UST collateral (DTCC) surged to 52.6 bps. The money market floor, [...]
In the US Treasury market, the situation has been a little different. The BOND ROUT!!! theory posits that without the Fed to buy up additional supply, yields as a technical factor have to rise putting more upward pressure on rates than already exists from a booming economy. Add to that foreign selling in 2018, it left many expecting an epic [...]
All better now. It’s a Christmas miracle, the plunge erased by market closure as if FDR had just been re-elected and taken the oath. The Dow is on everyone’s mind, so trading on December 26 has understandably stuck. Stocks posted their best day in nearly a decade on Wednesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average notching its largest one-day point [...]
Rather than sticking gold in with my last one on collateral, I felt it deserved its own focus. Its duality often puts it on the side of deflation with collateral shortage as the main mechanism. Given that, it wouldn’t have been surprising if gold was collapsing now as it had been during the earlier eurodollar mess after mid-April. But, as [...]
The problem, or one of them anyway, with so many glaring market warnings is that it becomes difficult to keep up with all of them. You tend to focus on those right in front of you, the more immediate and visible. Oil is everything for reflation, and therefore its untimely end, so naturally the WTI curve gets all the unlovable [...]
The week is only two days so far, but the oil crash in it has now been taken into elite company. The WTI benchmark is now down about 40% from its high set just a month and a half ago. As noted yesterday, this isn’t normal, healthy behavior. Crude isn’t exactly fickle, so a crash like this should be appreciated [...]
If there is one thing Ben Bernanke got right, it was this. In 2009 during the worst of the worst monetary crisis in four generations, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman was asked in front of Congress if we all should be worried about zombies. Senator Bob Corker wasn’t talking about the literal undead, rather a scenario much like Japan where the [...]
There were rumors and whispers of a trade truce between China and the US. Wages domestically grew by the most since 2009, better than 3% last month. OPEC is going to be cutting oil production again. And most of all, for the mainstream narrative anyway, the Fed is about to go on a break. Why didn’t markets react positively to [...]
On August 30, 2006, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported preliminary estimates for US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the second quarter. It was figured back then that domestic output increased 2.9% over the first quarter, seasonally adjusted, somewhat of a decrease from the robust start to 2006. Final estimates for Q1 thought the economy had advanced 5.6% during [...]
Is the media data dependent? Depends, of course, on what you mean by “dependent.” One year ago, as December 2017 dawned, you couldn’t go a day even a few hours without some mainstream outlet publishing an ode to the LABOR SHORTAGE!!! A full part of the hysteria of the time, the idea of globally synchronized growth last year was started [...]
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