Tag Archives: inflation

It should be as simple as it sounds. Lower LT UST yields, less growth and inflation. Thus, higher LT UST yields, more growth and inflation. Right? If nominal levels are all there is to it, then simplicity rules the interpretation. Visiting with George Gammon last week, he confessed to committing this sin of omission. Rates have gone up, he reasoned reasonably, therefore it would seem to follow how the market must be shifting expectations toward the more optimistic...

What is the consensus about the economy today? Will 2022 growth be better or worse than 2021? Actually, that probably isn’t the right question because the economy slowed significantly in the second half of 2021. The real question is whether growth will improve from that reduced pace. The Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker now has Q4 growth all the way down to 5% from the 6.8% rate expected just a week ago (a result of a less than expected retail sales report). That’s still a...

How is that US Treasury rates out in the independent longer end of the yield curve have now “suffered” a seven percent CPI to go along with double taper and triple maybe quadruple (if the whispers are to be believed) rate hikes this year, yet have weathered all of that allegedly bond-busting brutality with barely a market fluctuation? The short end of the curve, as noted here, is being pressured by only the last of those things, rate hikes, and from them creating...

Overview:  US stocks built on the recovery started on Monday and Powell’s suggestion of letting the balance sheet shrink later this year eased some speculation of a fourth hike this year, which seemed to allow the Treasury market to stabilize.  What amounts to a greater appetite for risk is carrying over into Asia Pacific activity today. Many of the large bourses advanced more than 1%, with the Hang Seng up almost 2.8% and the Nikkei up  nearly as much.   Bond...

The dollar was high and going higher. Emerging markets had been seriously complaining. In one, the top central banker for India outright warned, “dollar funding has evaporated.” The TIC data supported his view, with full-blown negative months, net selling from afar that’s historically akin to what was coming out of India and the rest of the world. China was cutting its RRR multiple times. This was all following May 29, 2018, too, a day in the global “bond market”...

Gold price fell to $1,808 an ounce in the wake of the release of the minutes of the December Federal Reserve meeting, having hit an intra-day high of $1,829. Silver price fell to $22.72 an ounce from an intra-day high of $23.26. Gold and silver have continued to sell off this morning with gold trading as low as $1,794 and silver trading down to $22.14. The FOMC minutes showed a much more hawkish Fed than markets had been expecting. The minute suggests that the Fed...

The Omicron variant may be less fatal than the earlier versions, but it is disrupting economies. The surge in the Delta variant well into Q4 in the US and Europe was already slowing the recoveries. Investors will likely take the high-frequency real sector data with the proverbial pinch of salt until January data available beginning later this month. While the tribalist approach, exemplified by “team transition” and “team permanent” debates about inflation, 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...

Have oil producers shot themselves in the foot, while at the same time stabbing the global economy in the back? It’d be quite a feat if it turns out to be the case, one of those historical oddities that when anyone might honestly look back on it from the future still hung in disbelief. Let’s start by reviewing just the facts. First up, yesterday the Federal Reserve published the November 2021 estimates for Industrial Production in the United States. As has been the...