Tag Archives: Credit Markets

Contradictory Signals Special antennae that help traders catch upcoming opportunities. Available from the same outfit that sells the soup-cooling spoon (Acme Inc). - Click to enlarge There is just one more positioning indicator we want to mention: after surging by around $126 billion since March of 2016, NYSE margin debt has reached a new all time high of more than $561 billion. The important point about this is...

Another Shoeshine Boy Moment We recently pondered the markets while trying out our brand-new electric soup-cooling spoon (see below). We are pondering the markets quite often lately, because we believe tail risk has grown by leaps and bounds and we may be quite close to an important juncture, i.e.,  the kind of pivot that can generate both a lot of excitement and a lot of regret all around. Provided one manages to...

Suspicion isn’t Merely Asleep – It is in a Coma (or Dead) There is an old Monty Python skit about a parrot whose lack of movement and refusal to respond to prodding leads to an intense debate over what state it is in. Is it just sleeping, as the proprietor of the shop that sold it insists? A very tired parrot taking a really deep rest? Or is it actually dead, as the customer who bought it asserts, offering the fact...

  Wrong Focus If one searches for news on LIBOR (=London Interbank Offered Rate, i.e., the rate at which banks lend dollars to each other in the euro-dollar market), they are currently dominated by Deutsche Bank getting slapped with a total fine of $775 million for the part it played in manipulating the benchmark rate in collusion with other banks (fine for one count of wire fraud: US$150 m.; additional shakedown by US...

Is Stagflation a Potential Threat? The Incrementum Fund held its quarterly advisory board meeting on October 3 (the transcript can be downloaded below). Our regular participants – the two fund managers Ronald Stoeferle and Mark Valek, advisory board members Jim Rickards, Frank Shostak and yours truly –  were joined by special guest Grant Williams this time. Many of our readers probably know Grant; he is the author of...

  A Small and Lonely Group PARIS – It’s back to Europe. Back to school. Back to work. Let’s begin by bringing new readers into the discussion… and by reminding old readers (and ourselves) where we stand. US economic growth: average annual GDP growth over time spans ranging from 120 to 10 years (left hand side) and the 20 year moving average of annual GDP growth since 1967. Note that the bump in the 70 year average is...

  Insanity Rules Bond markets are certainly displaying a lot of enthusiasm at the moment – and it doesn’t matter which bonds one looks at, as the famous “hunt for yield” continues to obliterate interest returns across the board like a steamroller. Corporate and government debt have been soaring for years, but investor appetite for such debt has evidently grown even more. A huge mountain of interest-free risk has...

Summary: Debt is just the flip side of credit. As debt goes bad, credit disappears. And then the system that created so much credit-money will go into reverse, destroying the nation’s money supply. The money supply (actually, the supply of ready credit) will shrink – suddenly and dramatically. And what should have been a minor, routine pullback in the economy will become a catastrophic panic. Bezzle BALTIMORE – ...

Summary On Wednesday, Janet Yellen pressed on the broken buttons again.  After the two day FOMC meeting, the Fed Chair announced they’d continue pressing the federal funds rate down to just a ¼ to ½ percent – effectively zero.  What type of insanity is this? If she keeps it up, and whole thing doesn’t implode, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note could also slip below zero…along with the hopes and dreams of three...

  The Sharp Move in the VIX Accelerates In Monday’s trading session, the upward move in the volatility index VIX (which measures the implied volatility of SPX options) continued unabated, vastly out of proportion with the move in the underlying stock index. “Brexit” fears continue to grow, which has apparently been the driving force behind this move. The “Brexiteers” are gaining support as the referendum date draws...