The risk budget is again unchanged this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between bonds and risk assets is 50/50. Why is the stock market falling? Is it fear of a trade related slowdown? Or of an overly aggressive Fed hiking rates too far and killing one of the longest US expansions on record? Or is it more [...]
On February 12, 1999, the Bank of Japan announced that it was going full zero. Japan’s central bank would from that day forward push the overnight uncollateralized lending (interbank) rate to the zero lower bound. Further, it pledged to keep it there until Japan’s economy recovered. The economic slump in the nineties had been by 1999 almost a decade in [...]
On December 12, 2007, the Federal Reserve announced its entry into emergency “non-standard” policy measures. In a belated attempt to “address elevated pressures in short-term funding markets”, the US central bank would begin auctioning reserve funds “against the wide variety of collateral that can be used to secure loans at the discount window.” The Term Auction Facility (TAF) would become, [...]
The global economy was in very rough shape in 1980. Caught in the spiral of the Great Inflation, there was practically nowhere to hide from ripping upheaval – beyond just the economic problems. Despite trying seemingly everything for an entire decade, nothing Economists came up with would rebalance the system. They kept saying they only needed time for their schemes [...]
The US is going it alone. The rest of the world isn’t so synchronized like it was, purportedly, in 2017. No matter, at least for Americans. Even Europe, last year’s poster boy for what this upswing was going to accomplish, has thoroughly disappointed. The United States is just going to have to leave everyone else behind with no regrets. The [...]
This has already been one of the longest economic expansions on record for the US and there is little in the data or markets to indicate that is about to come to an end. Current levels of the yield curve are comparable to late 2005 in the last cycle. It was almost two years later before we even had an [...]
The US yield curve isn’t the only one on the precipice. There are any number of them that are getting attention for all the wrong reasons. At least those rationalizations provided by mainstream Economists and the central bankers they parrot. As noted yesterday, the UST 2s10s is now the most requested data out of FRED. It’s not just that the [...]
There are a few pretty good indications that inflation hysteria is long dead. Since this was one of the more extreme forms, it’s also relevant in parsing any shift from reflation back to deflation. There are any number of markets suggesting as much already. Still, this one really has to sting for sunny, confident Jerome Powell. From the St. Louis [...]
The FOMC statement for the July-August 2018 policy meeting exceeded expectations once more. It’s difficult for the Committee to continually do this since the whole point of these things is to downplay all expectations. The goal is to make everything seem boring and uninteresting, if the Federal Reserve is doing its job. But they are always interesting because nothing over [...]
The Q2 GDP report (+4.1% from the previous quarter, annualized) was heralded by the administration as a great achievement and certainly putting a 4 handle on quarter to quarter growth has been rare this cycle, if not unheard of (Q4 '09, Q4 '11, Q2 & Q3 '14). But looking at the GDP change year over year shows a little different [...]
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