Tag Archives: U.S. Treasuries

In the world of assets classes, I don’t believe it is equities which hold the Federal Reserve’s attention. After the 2006-11 debacle, the big bust, you can at least understand why policymakers might be more attuned to real estate no matter how the NYSE trades. It may be a decade ago, but that’s the one thing out of the Global Financial Crisis which was seared into the consciousness of everyone who lived through it....

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) piled on more bad news to the otherwise pleasing GDP headline for the first quarter. In its first revision to the preliminary estimate, the government agency said output advanced just a little less than first thought. This wasn’t actually the substance of their message. Accompanying this first revision was the first set of estimates for corporate profits. For the second straight...

Understand what the word “transitory” truly means in this context. It is no different than Ben Bernanke saying, essentially, subprime is contained. To the Fed Chairman in early 2007, this one little corner of the mortgage market in an otherwise booming economy was a transitory blip that booming economy would easily withstand. Just eight days before Bernanke would testify confidently before Congress, the FOMC had met to...

By far, the biggest problem in Economics is that it has no sense of itself. There are no self-correction mechanisms embedded within the discipline to make it disciplined. Without having any objective goals from which to measure, the goal is itself. Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase talked about this deficiency in his Nobel Lecture: This neglect of other aspects of the system has been made easier by another...

Gold, in my worldview, can be a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition. If it goes up, that’s fear. Nothing good. If it goes down, that’s collateral. In many ways, worse. Either way, it is only bad, right? Not always. There are times when rising gold signals inflation, more properly reflation perceptions. Determining which is which is the real challenge. Corroboration and consistency are paramount. Gold had been...

On August 12, 1985, Japan Airways flight 123 left Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on its way to a scheduled arrival in Osaka. Twelve minutes into the flight, the aircraft, a Boeing 747, suffered catastrophic failure when an aft pressure bulkhead burst. The airplane had been improperly repaired from a tailstrike (the tail of the aircraft actually hitting the runway pavement) seven years earlier, and therefore wasn’t sufficiently...

These things are actually quite related, though I understand how it might not appear to be that way at first. As noted earlier today, the Fed (yet again) proves it has no idea how global money markets work. They can’t even get federal funds right after two technical adjustments to IOER (the joke). But as esoteric as all that may be, recent corporate statements leave much less doubt at least as to the primary effect....

Quick review: stocks hit a bit of a rough patch right during the height of inflation hysteria. At the end of January 2018, just as the US unemployment rate had finally achieved the very center of attention, global markets were rocked by instability. Unexpectedly, of course. Over the next several weeks, share prices sagged and people blamed it on a number of things: Korean War, the unemployment rate itself (the economy...

What gets them into trouble is how they just can’t help themselves. Go back one year, to early 2018. Last February it was all-but-assured (in mainstream coverage) that the US economy was going to take off. The bond market, meaning UST’s, was about to be massacred because the overheating boom would force a double shot down its throat. Not only would safety instruments like UST’s have to contend with the unemployment...

It infects every boardroom across the world. Big business requires decent forecasting, yet time and again it seems they are deprived of what they desperately need. Instead, even after this last decade, the world’s largest companies continue to be surprised by weakness that is far more prevalent than strength. It has been the one constant. Central bankers declare their policies successful, ignoring mountains of...