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 [...]
Back at the end of May, Germany’s statistical accounting agency (deStatis) added another one to the inflationary inferno raging across the mainstream media. According to its flash calculations, German consumer prices last month had increased by the fastest rate in 13 years. Even using the European “harmonized” methodology (Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, or HICP), inflation had reached 2.4% year-over-year [...]
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. George Orwell, 1984 I have said many times and believe deeply that our job as investors is not to predict the future but merely to interpret the present as accurately as we can. I've also said and believe deeply that doing [...]
Consumer prices in Japan fell again in May, according to that country’s Ministry of Finance. The headline CPI was 0.1% less last month than it had been in the same month during 2020. Though it was the eighth straight for outright deflation, there was some good news in the core rate, if you could call it that, which flipped to [...]
The FOMC held a meeting and that can only mean dots. These are the individual policymaker’s views on where the federal funds target range might end up down the road. The latest update for the June 2021 central bank conclave shows several more voting members projecting the first rate hikes to begin toward the end of next year, a supposedly [...]
It isn’t all base effects, or even all that much of them. Though these were higher in May 2021 than they had been in April, US consumer prices have accelerated regardless. According to the BLS and its latest CPI estimates, the net change in its headline index last month from last May was an excitable 4.99% (unadjusted). That’s the highest [...]
It wasn’t all that long ago when the media began to fill itself up with one story after another about how huge looming inflationary pressures were causing the entire “market” to rethink its lengthy and determined anti-reflationary stance. Back in March, for instance, S&P had joined this chorus by zeroing in on eurodollar futures, of all instruments, and coming back [...]
Back on February 25, Treasury auctioned 7-year notes and it did not go (as) well. Maybe you remember us saying something about it, and then again and again and… The prevailing view then – and now – was reflation hadn’t just accelerated, the true inflation long-promised by so much “money printing” (or at least by those who equate bank reserves [...]
The way it has been described since, yesterday’s CPI estimates for last month represented a seismic shift in the inflation debate. There is no more argument, apparently, and if that wasn’t apparent enough then today it was followed up with even more highly-touted evidence. Producer prices, the PPI, came up even more over-the-moon than those for consumers.The commodities portion, no [...]
Friday, July 14, 2000, was a bad day to be in Treasuries. The 10-year UST yield spiked 9 bps after the Census Bureau reported June 2000 retail sales growth had been nearly 10% year-over-year. That plus a similarly pleasant reading from the Federal Reserve for Industrial Production left bond traders rethinking their trades, a sudden burst of inflationary confidence which [...]
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