Tag Archives: 5) Global Macro

The risk budget is unchanged again this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between bonds and risk assets is evenly split. The only change to the portfolio is the one I wrote about last week, an exchange of TIP for SHY. Interest rates are on the rise again, the 10 year Treasury yield punching through 3% again this morning. That is an indication that growth and/or inflation expectations have risen...

Description: In just over 2 months Russia has sold-off over 85% of its holdings of U.S. Treasuries, should the U.S. be concerned? – Russia has liquidated 85% of its US Treasury holdings in just two months – Russia dumps over $90 billion of Treasuries in April and May as holdings collapse from near $100 billion to just $9 billion – Deepening geo-political tensions between Russia and U.S. and Russian concerns about the...

The confidence and hubris of those directing the rest of us to race off the cliff while they watch from a safe distance is off the charts. The past decade of “recovery” and “growth” has actually been a decade of catastrophic losses for our society and nation. Here’s a short list of what we’ve lost: 1. Functioning markets. Free markets discover price and assess risk. What passes for markets now are little more than...

Stock Markets EM FX enjoyed a respite from the ongoing selling pressures, with most currencies up on the week vs. the dollar. Best performers were CLP, MXN, and ZAR while the worst were TRY, CNY, and COP.  BOJ, Fed, and BOE meetings this week may pose some risks to EM FX. Stock Markets Emerging Markets, July 25 - Click to enlarge South Africa South Africa reports June money, loan, and budget data Monday. June...

These embedded processes strip away autonomy, equating compliance with effectiveness even as the processes become increasingly counter-productive and wasteful. Would any sane person choose America’s broken healthcare system over a cheaper, more effective alternative? Let’s see: the current system costs twice as much per person as the healthcare systems of our developed-world competitors, a medication to treat infantile...

Keep an eye on the system’s buffers. They look fine until they suddenly collapse. The doom-and-gloomers among us who have been predicting the unraveling of an inherently unstable financial system appear to have been disproved by the reflation of yet another credit-asset bubble. But inherently unstable / imbalanced systems can stumble onward for years or even decades, making fools of all who warn of an eventual reset....

Note: This will be a short update. We are shifting the timing of some of our reports. The monthly Global Asset Allocation update will now be published in the first week of the month, aiming for the first of each month. I’ll put out a full report next week. The Bi-Weekly Economic Review is shifting to a monthly update, published on the 15th of each month. We are doing this to make room for some new reports, podcasts and...

In 1999, real GDP growth in the United States was 4.69% (Q4 over Q4). In 1998, it was 4.9989%. These were annual not quarterly rates, meaning that for two years straight GDP expanded by better than 4.5%. Individual quarters within those years obviously varied, but at the end of the day the economy was clearly booming. It also helped that these particular two years followed two good ones before them. GDP growth in 1997...

[embedded content] Economic thoughts and analysis from Alhambra Investments CEO Joe Calhoun. Related posts: Mid-Year Global Markets Update Bi-Weekly Economic Review – (VIDEO) What will the rest of the year bring? Bi-Weekly Economic Review (VIDEO) Great Graphic: Two-year Rate Differentials Bi-Weekly Economic Review Bi-Weekly Economic Review...

The nation’s premier corporate profit engines / social media giants are the ideal platforms for undermining the U.S. via the sowing of disintegration. Whether it’s stated or not, one source of the inchoate outrage triggered by Russian-sourced purchases of adverts on Facebook in 2016 (i.e. “meddling in our election”) is the sense that the U.S. is sacrosanct due to our innate moral goodness and our Imperial Project: never...