The economic surprises keep piling up on the negative side of the ledger as the Fed persists in tightening policy or at least pretending that they are. If a rate changes in the wilderness can the market hear it? Outside of the stock market one would be hard pressed to find evidence of the effectiveness of all the Fed's extraordinary [...]
What is most tragically ironic about the last decade is that the people who are supposed to have been in charge are the same people claiming it could never happen. Ben Bernanke, for example, made his career on studying the Great Depression. Using Milton Friedman’s brand of primitive monetarism as a base, he and others like him developed the modern [...]
Today started out very badly for the FOMC. At 8:30am the Commerce Department reported “unexpectedly” weak retail sales while at the very same time the BLS published CPI statistics that were thoroughly predictable. Markets, at least credit and money markets, have gained a clearer idea what the Fed is actually doing and why. It’s not at all what the media [...]
Some economic and financial conditions leave a yield curve as a more complex affair. Then there are others that are incredibly simple. The UST yield curve is the former, while right now the Chinese Treasury curve is the latter. Even still, the media manages to make it something it isn’t because the world from its perspective is surely improving, and [...]
What is the yield curve supposed to look like? It’s a simple question that doesn’t actually have an answer. And because it doesn’t, there is a whole lot of confusion about bond yields. To wit: Chadha, the chief global strategist at Deutsche Bank’s U.S. securities unit, is part of a group of die-hard bond bears who say Treasuries have become [...]
The economic reports released since the last of these updates was generally not all that bad but the reports considered more important were disappointing. And it should be noted that economic reports lately have generally been worse than expected which, if you believe the market to be fairly efficient, is what really matters. The disappointing employment report and the generally [...]
When looking at the bond market or eurodollar futures, both tugged by JPY, I don’t think it was just the payroll report that pushed new levels of anti-reflation today. Instead, there is too much that is consistent with a weak payroll report, and by that a mean a string of them. Yesterday, for example, automakers released their sales estimates for [...]
The economic data releases since the last update were generally upbeat but markets are forward looking and the future apparently isn't to their liking. Of course, it is hard to tell sometimes whether bonds, the dollar and stocks are responding to the real economy or the one people hope Donald Trump can deliver when he isn't busy contradicting his communications [...]
I don’t pay much attention to the 2 year part of the UST curve because I think it is susceptible to information spoilage, distortions that aren’t strictly related to what a “risk-free” 2s should tell us. But as my colleague Joe Calhoun often reminds me, just because I don’t think it as important doesn’t mean that other people see in [...]
There is no change to the risk budget this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between risk assets and bonds is unchanged at 50/50. There are, however, changes within the asset classes. We are reducing the equity allocation and raising the allocation to REITs. Based on the bond markets there has been little change in the growth and [...]
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