At first glance, or first exposure to this, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why all these so many pieces could be related. Outwardly, from the mainstream perspective, anyway, you’d think them random, and even if somehow correlated they’re supposed to be in the opposite way from what’s happened. Too much money, they said. It began with the Fed’s [...]
At some point, these are just numbers. By themselves, numbers give you no context, nor any sense of bearings. Arithmetic merely lines everything up and counts what goes where. To a top-down central economic planning structure, everything is as if a spreadsheet; if X, then Y.But then what?China’s 13th National People’s Congress jumped into its fifth annual session this past [...]
Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun discusses the impact of the Ukraine/Russia situation on oil, recession, European stock markets, and Alhambra portfolios.
Crude oil prices rose over 25% last week and as I sit down to write this evening, the overnight futures are up another 8% to around $125. Almost every other commodity on the planet rose in prices last week too, as did the dollar. Those two factors - rising dollar and rising commodity prices - mean the likelihood of recession [...]
If only, like in the aftermath of the Apollo 13 explosion, we could just radio Houston to get started in figuring out just the way out of our fix. Mission Control would certainly buzz all the right people with the right stuff, summoning the best engineers and scientists from their quiet divans to the frenzied and dangerous work ahead. Sadly, [...]
Most people have the impression that these various payroll and employment reports just go into the raw data and count up the number of payrolls and how many Americans are employed. Perhaps the BLS taps the IRS database as fellow feds, or ADP as a private company in the same data business of employment just tallies how many payrolls it [...]
Though I say, write, and communicate all the time how the Federal Reserve is not a central bank because it doesn’t do money and that therefore its non-money monetary policies are little more than pop psychology conveyed via an increasingly stale puppet show, you might be surprised to learn that none other than Janet Yellen has publicly agreed with my [...]
Remember the summer slowdown? Not last year’s, the first one. Back around July and August 2020 when what was supposed to have been a V-shaped recovery fell way off that trend. Instead, blamed on something with COVID, the US (and global economy) limped its way toward the end of that year just in time for its sugar-rush restart via helicopter.Twenty-twenty’s [...]
Late in March 2020, the Bank of Russia (BoR) abruptly announced it would no longer purchase gold. For years, Russia’s monetary authorities had been the metal’s biggest buyer, not just among official institutions but anywhere in the world. In fact, the country had been steadily accumulating bullion ever since October 2006; an effort that accelerated, not coincidentally, in April 2014 [...]
The most common explanation for UST repo fails is that short sellers become an imbalance in the market for Treasuries. Convinced (isn’t everyone?) interest rates have nowhere to go but up and these instruments are doomed, therefore ripe to profit from the destruction, short selling sharks supposedly swoop in. Since they’ve borrowed UST’s they don’t own, the herd is susceptible [...]
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