Tag Archives: Markets

While we wait for the electoral count to be sorted out by what we hope are competent and honest people (not holding our breath), there’s a greater muddle growing where it actually counts and where it’s never fully nor properly accounted. By a large and growing number of accounts, the US economy’s rebound seems to have stalled out back around June or July, an inflection unrelated to COVID case counts, too. The rebound is still rebounding, of course, and this upturn...

With all eyes on Washington DC, today, everyone should instead be focused on Europe. As we’ve written for nearly three years now, for nearly three years Europe has been at the unfortunate forefront of Euro$ #4. We could argue about whether coming out of GFC2 back in March pushed everything into a Reflation #4 – possible – or if this is still just one three-yearlong squeeze of a global dollar shortage. Either way, Europe gets at it first. In 2018, what had been...

This isn’t about COVID. It’s been building since the end of August, a shift in mood, perception, and reality that began turning things several months before even then. With markets fickle yet again, a lot today, what’s going on here? What you’ll hear or have already heard is something about Europe and more lockdowns, fears about a second wave of the pandemic. No, that doesn’t fit the herdlike change in direction you can observe across many different markets (below)....

[embedded content] Alhambra’s’ Bob Williams describes Charitable Remainder Trusts and how they can be used as a planning tool to create a win-win for you and charities. You Might Also Like What The PMIs Aren’t Really Saying, In China As Elsewhere China’s PMI’s continue to impress despite the fact they continue to be wholly unimpressive. As with most economic numbers in today’s stock-focused...

They should be drooling over the prospects of a clearing path toward normality. The pain and disaster of 2020’s economic hole receding into a more pleasant 2021 which would have been in position to conceivably pay it all back before any long run damage. Getting back to just even with February instead is becoming a distant probability, the kind of non-transitory shortfall with which we’ve grown far too accustomed. Therefore, “they” now salivate (reported to be...

Europeans are growing more downbeat again. While ostensibly many are more worried about a new set of restrictions due to (even more overreactions about) COVID, that’s only part of the problem. The bigger factor, economically speaking, is that Europe’s economy has barely moved, or at most not moved near enough, off the bottom. To interrupt now what has already proved to be a seriously impaired rebound should get people thinking more realistically about 2021. Once...

The Department of Labor attached a technical note to its weekly report on unemployment claims. The state of California has announced that it is suspending the processing of initial claims filed by (former) workers in that state. Government officials have decided to pause their efforts for two weeks so as to try and sort out what “might” be widespread fraud. The state is also using this time to get after a substantial backlog of previous initial claims yet to be...

The BLS’s payroll report draws most of the mainstream attention, with the exception of the unemployment rate (especially these days). The government designates the former as the Current Employment Statistics (CES) series, and it intends to measure factors like payrolls (obviously), wages, and earnings from the perspective of the employers, or establishments. The Establishment Survey. Its cousin is called the Household Survey, or CPS, the Current Population Survey,...

[embedded content] Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun and Alhambra’s Bob Williams look at data from the past month and discuss what it means for the economy. You Might Also Like Monthly Market Monitor – July 2020 Most Long-Term Trends Have Not Changed. A lot has changed over the last 4 months since the COVID virus started to impact the global economy. Asia was infected first with China at ground zero. Their economy...

It’s always something. There’s forever some mystery factor standing in the way. On the topic of inflation, for years it was one “transitory” issue after another. The media, on behalf of the central bankers it holds up as a technocratic ideal, would report these at face value. The more obvious explanation, the argument with all the evidence, just couldn’t be true otherwise it’d collapse the technocracy right down to the ground. And so it was also in the bond market....