Tag Archives: 5.) Alhambra Investments

When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money. The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it was again his topic in California early Autumn ’97. As Emil Kalinowski and I had...

With the monthly Friday Payroll Ritual lurking tomorrow morning, and having been focused on PMI estimates before it, a quick look at the ISM’s Non-manufacturing PMI especially its employment index to bridge the latter to the former. The update today for the month of December put the headline estimate at 62.0, down from 69.1 the month prior. Omicron? While a rather sharp and unexpected 7-point drop, other than the size of the decline at 62.0 there’s little to suspect...

Sentiment indicators like PMI’s are nice and all, but they’re hardly top-tier data. It’s certainly not their fault, these things are made for very times than these (piggy-backing on the ISM Manufacturing’s long history without having the long history). Most of them have come out since 2008, if only because of the heightened professional interest in macroeconomics generated by a global macro economy that can never get itself going. What PMI’s do have going for them is...

There were a few surprises included in the BLS JOLTS data just released today for the month of November (note: the government has changed its release schedule so that JOLTS, already one month further in arrears than the payroll report, CES & CPS, will now come out earlier so that its numbers are publicly available for the same monthly payrolls before the next CES & CPS get released). Not really about the JOLTS figures themselves, though there are...

Since the Federal Reserve is not in the money business, their recent hawkish shift toward an increasingly anti-inflationary stance is a twisted and convoluted case of subjective interpretation. Inflation is money and if the Fed was a central bank the issue of consumer prices wouldn’t necessarily be simple, it would, however, be much simpler: is there or isn’t there too much money flowing through the economy. News to the vast majority of the public, no one at any...

Chinese run media, the Global Times, blatantly tweeted an homage to China’s late leader Mao Zedong commemorating his 128th birthday. Fully understanding the storm of controversy this would create, with the Communist government’s full approval, such a provocation has been taken in the West as if just one more chess piece played in its geopolitical game against the United States in particular. No. The Communists really mean it. Mao’s their guy again. No. Let’s recall...

We’re only ever given the two options: the economy is either in recession, or it isn’t. And if “not”, then we’re led to believe it must be in recovery if not outright booming already. These are what Economics says is the business cycle. A full absence of unit roots. No gray areas to explore the sudden arrival of only deeply unsatisfactory “booms.” Every once in a while, however, even the mainstream media meanders closer to the actual economics (small “e”) of the...

If there is a better, more fitting way to head into the Christmas holiday in the United States than by digging into the finances and monetary flows of the People’s Bank of China, then I just don’t want to know what it is. Contrary to maybe anyone’s rational first impression that this is somehow insane, there’s much we can tell about the state of the world, the whole world and its “dollars”, right from this one key data source. And the timing is equally as festive;...

With the eurodollar futures curve slightly inverted, the implications of it are somewhat specific to the features of that particular market. And there’s more than enough reason to reasonably suspect this development is more specifically deflationary money than more general economic concerns. What I mean is, those latter have come later (“growth scare”) only long after the world’s real money truly began to dry up. Money then economy. How do we know? For one, sequence...

Seems like ancient history given all that’s happened since, but on October 13 Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced a planned deluge of cash management bills in the wake of the debt ceiling resolution (the first one). The next day, China’s currency, CNY, broke free from its previous and suspiciously narrow range. Speculating a connection a few days thereafter, I wrote: …it had been on the 13th when Treasury announced its intention to unleash a CMB (cash...