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Tag Archives: 5) Global Macro

Two Ways the System Is Rigged: HFT and Oligarchic Inheritance

The net result of a rigged system is the vast majority of the gains in income and wealth flow to the very tippy-top of the wealth/power pyramid. We often hear how the system (i.e. our economy) is rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many, but exactly how is it rigged? Longtime correspondent Zeus Y. recently highlighted two specific mechanisms that favor the top 0.01%: high frequency trading (HFT) and...

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Hall of Mirrors, Where’d The Labor Shortage Go?

Today was supposed to see the release of the Census Bureau’s retail trade report, a key data set pertaining to the (alarming) state of American consumers, therefore workers by extension (income). With the federal government in partial shutdown, those numbers will be delayed until further notice. In their place we will have to manage with something like the Federal Reserves’ Beige Book. It may not be close to the same...

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That’s A Big Minus

Goods require money to finance both their production as well as their movements. They need oil and energy for the same reasons. If oil and money markets were drastically awful for a few months before December, and then purely chaotic during December, Mario Draghi of all people should’ve been paying attention. China put up some bad trade numbers for last month, but Europe’s goods downturn came first. According to...

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Spreading Sour Not Soar

We are starting to get a better sense of what happened to turn everything so drastically in December. Not that we hadn’t suspected while it was all taking place, but more and more in January the economic data for the last couple months of 2018 backs up the market action. These were no speculators looking to break Jay Powell, probing for weakness in Mario Draghi’s resolve. There are real economic processes underneath....

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As Germany and France Come Apart, So Too Will the EU

If we follow the logic and evidence presented in these seven points, we are forced to conclude that the fractures in France, Germany and the EU are widening by the day. When is a nation-state no longer a functional state? It’s an interesting question to ask of the European nation-states trapped in the devolving European Union. Longtime correspondent Mark G. recently posed seven indicators of dissolving national...

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Insight Japan

As I wrote yesterday, “In the West, consumer prices overall are pushed around by oil. In the East, by food.” In neither case is inflation buoyed by “money printing.” Central banks both West and East are doing things, of course, but none of them amount to increasing the effective supply of money. Failure of inflation, more so economy, the predictable cost. In yesterday’s article the topic in the East was China. Today,...

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The Decline and Fall of the European Union

This exhaustion of the neocolonial-neofeudal model was inevitable, and as a result, so too is the decline and fall of the European integration/exploitation project. That a single currency, the euro, would fracture rather than unite Europe was understood long before the euro’s introduction as legal tender on January 1, 2002. The euro, the currency of 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union, is only one of the...

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Where Will You Be Seated at the Banquet of Consequences?

To get a good seat at the banquet of consequences, the owner of capital has to shift his/her capital into scarce forms for which there is demand. The Banquet of Consequences is being laid out, and so the question is: where will you be seated? The answer depends on two dynamics I’ve mentioned many times: what types of capital you own and the asymmetries of our economy. One set of asymmetries is the result of the system...

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Rate of Change

We’ve got to change our ornithological nomenclature. Hawks become doves because they are chickens underneath. Doves became hawks for reasons they don’t really understand. A fingers-crossed policy isn’t a robust one, so there really was no reason to expect the economy to be that way. In January 2019, especially the past few days, there are so many examples of flighty birds. Here’s an especially obvious, egregious one...

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2019 Outlook

A discussion of the outlook for 2019 in the markets and the economy by Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun and the Head of Alhambra Global Investment Research Jeff Snider. [embedded content] Related posts: Euro Credit: 2019 Outlook Gold Outlook 2019: Uncertainty Makes Gold A “Valuable Strategic Asset” – WGC Core Euro Sovereign Bonds 2019 Outlook A Couple...

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