With money market reform (2a7) more than a month in the rear view, LIBOR rates continue to rise regardless. Three-month LIBOR jumped to 91.622 bps Friday, up from 88.4 bps to begin the month of November. The 1-year maturity is now well over 160 bps, up more than 100 bps going back to November 2014. Since 2a7 is behind us, [...]
One of the most significant pieces of legislation ever argued and turned into law was the Banking Act of 1935. Maybe even more than the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the legislative basis for Executive Order 6102 and the end of gold inside the United States, the 1935 law codified what were in 1933 more properly observed as experiments. The [...]
The end of 2016 will be here before you know it. Here at Alhambra Investment Partners we want to remind you of some requirements and opportunities to put on your financial to-do list before year end. Take your RMD If you’re over 70 ½ and have a Traditional IRA, 401(k), 403(b), or 457 plan, the IRS forces you to [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard The reported economic data of the last few weeks (it's been 3 weeks since my last update so I guess technically this isn't the Bi-Weekly Review) provides about as much direction and insight as the polls conducted prior to the election. To my eye, the trend here is trendless with a decidedly mixed set of data, each [...]
So how does it end? It’s the only question that matters, more so perhaps than asking when this “end” might occur. We see the “dollar” tanking currencies again, though mostly the majors this time, but currencies have tanked for as long as they have floated; and a great many before that time, too. Is there something different now that wasn’t [...]
After being pummeled by a concurrent stock and real estate crash, Japanese officials by late 1992 felt that enough was enough. The Nikkei 225 stock index that was nearly 40,000 toward the end of 1989 had crashed to below 15,000 by August 1992. From that point, however, Japanese stocks had started rising again. Through the summer of 1992, things looked [...]
The Treasury Department’s Treasury International Custody (TIC) estimates for September were released, and though I wish they were timelier they do typically confirm what we suspect about the months at each update. There were negatives all over this latest month, including private flows, which would fit the overall narrative where Chinese money markets were all over the place and repo [...]
Consumer prices accelerated again in October 2016, with the overall CPI calculating a 1.64% inflation rate. That is up from 1.46% in September, and the highest since October 2014. The reason is energy prices. For the first time in over two years, the energy component of the CPI was positive year-over-year. Having been as low as -20% in early 2015, [...]
In another case of government meeting reality, Saudi Arabia sacked its long-serving Finance Minister at the end of October. In a move reminiscent of the recent shakeup in Beijing’s Finance Ministry, with longstanding technocrat Lou Jiwei being ousted, Saudi Arabia has had to face up to more than just oil prices. Ibrahim al-Assaf had been in that position since 1996, [...]
As the Chinese yuan continues to sink lower in what looks to be an increasingly uncontrolled fashion, the desperate linking of that to US interest rates becomes even more absurd. As shown yesterday, global currencies have run into great trouble with US rates moving higher and lower; in fact more so with lower US rates than higher. The connection between [...]
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