Tag Archives: 5.) Alhambra Investments

Ben Bernanke once admitted how the job of the post-truth “central banker” is to try to convince the market to do your work for you. What he didn’t say was that this was the only prayer officials had for any success. Because if the market ever decided that talk wasn’t enough, only real money in hand would do, everyone’d be screwed. Yes, 2008. Also everything after. The Chinese have followed closely this style having realized what took Bernanke too long. That is, the...

Consumer confidence in Germany never really picked up all that much last year. Conflating CPIs with economic condition, this divergence proved too big of a mystery. When the German GfK, for example, perked up only a tiny bit around September and October 2021, the color of consumer prices clouded judgement and interpretation of what had always been a damning situation. From GfK back then: The growing consumer optimism signals that consumers here consider the German...

It’s not just the flood of never-ending inventory. That’s a huge and growing problem, sure, as the chickens of last year’s short-termism overordering finally come home to their retailer roost. Being stuck with too many goods isn’t necessarily fatal to the global and domestic manufacturing sectors. The scale of the burden is one key worry, though equally so is demand. When the orders were placed during last year, companies appear to have fully bought into (literally)...

Health Savings Accounts (HSA) for retired folks. Isn’t that a novel idea? But it’s being considered in Congress—The Health Savings for Seniors Act, H.R. 3796. As it stands right now, the only people eligible for an HSA are those aged 65 years and younger who have a high-deductible health insurance plan meaning you have to pay $1,400 out-of-pocket for an individual or $2,800 for a family before the insurance plan pays anything. You get to deduct your contributions to...

It’s not recession fears, those are in the past. For much if not most (vast majority) of mainstream pundits and newsmedia alike, unlike regular folks this is all news to them (the irony, huh?) Economists and central bankers everywhere had said last year was a boom, a true inflationary inferno raging worldwide. For once, CPIs (or European HICPs) seemed to have confirmed the narrative. Unlike 2018 when inflation indices kept policymakers and their forecasts out in the...

The only thing that changed was the CPI. What distinguishes 2021-22 from the prior post-crisis period 2007-20 is merely the performance of whatever consumer price index. This latter has been called inflation, yet the data conclusively support the market verdict pricing how it never was. What data? The “everything” data, the most comprehensive financial and monetary compendium yet available: The Financial Accounts of the United States, or Z1. While this doesn’t quite...

Note: This update is longer than usual but I felt a comprehensive review was necessary. The Federal Reserve panicked last week and spooked investors into the worst week for stocks since the onset of COVID in March 2020. The S&P 500 is now firmly in bear market territory but that is a fraction of the pain in stocks and other risky assets. Stocks are now down 10 of the last 11 weeks but the pain was concentrated in the last two weeks. 5 of the last 8 trading days...

Over the weekend, Bitcoin tumbled again. Reaching an ultra-ugly low of $17,641 (before retracing back above $20k), even the self-styled premier digital “store of value” has thrown in the towel. As I wrote last week, winter isn’t coming it is here. One crucial reason why, the Japan’s Ministry of Finance reported last week how imports into that country during the tumultuous month of April surged by a frankly ridiculous 48.9% year-over-year. It was the biggest annual...

If the March gasoline/oil spike hit a weak global economy really hard and caused what more and more looks like a recessionary shock, a(n un)healthy part of it was the acceleration of Euro$ #5 concurrently rippling through the global reserve system. This much was apparent right from the start, with financial markets gone haywire three months ago (mid-March seasonal bottleneck), and then more of the same into April right to now. The updated TIC data for the month of...

At his last press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell made a bunch of unsubstantiated claims, none of which were called out or even questioned by the assembled reporters. These rituals are designed to project authority not conduct inquiry, and this one was perhaps the best representation of that intent. Powell’s job is to put the current predicament in the best possible light, starting by downplaying the current predicament. From there, to try to get the...