Volatility Can Be The Expiration of Reflation
While our focus is usually trained on markets, volatility as a concept can apply to much more than asset inflation extremities. The Japanese bond and stock markets are conforming to the QE script, as US markets begin to correlate (across the JPY-USD). What’s really interesting, however, is that despite now four years into a “recovery” .. read more
A Closer Look: Market Cap
After a scorching start to the year, the S&P 500 Cap-Weighted Index ((IVV)) finally pulled back some, a week after setting all time highs at the 1687 level. With this weekend’s release of dismal China PMI data, it seems likely that the index will continue the momentum downward to its 50-day moving average at the .. read more
Sunday Gold Fix – Unfortunately, Gold Lost
The majority of investors that are attracted to gold are those that view the metal as real money. Money is a supposed to be a limited, scarce object that is not subject to the whims of human interference. But, to the dismay of true money believers, gold long ago lost the war of the modern .. read more
Personal Income & Spending Align
Consumer confidence is at multi-year highs while personal income and wage levels for April were declining on a nominal basis. Without the boost of 0.2% “deflation”, disposable personal income actually declined 0.1% on a nominal basis. Personal spending fell 0.2% on a nominal basis. The internals of the nominal decline related to three separate items .. read more
An Economic Perspective Of Earnings
With today’s slight downward revision to Q1 ’13 GDP, apologies to Eric Rosengren, comes the preliminary estimate of corporate profits. Corporate earnings estimated here by the BEA are sometimes quite different from those estimated by Standard & Poors, for example. One major difference is the S&P focus on earnings per share, where the BEA is .. read more
This Is What It Sounds Like, When Doves Cry
When even Eric Rosengren, Boston Fed President, is thinking about “tapering” you know something is a tad askew in FOMC-land. Again and again, these doves (including Charles Evans at the head of the Chicago Fed branch) had advocated the heaviest of hands of monetary intervention. QE 3 & 4 could not have been big enough .. read more
Fed’s ‘Taper’ Talk Is Targeted
The talk of tapering QE has been incessant the past few weeks, no doubt playing a huge role in the volatility of the US Treasury market (as if there is some competition with the JGB market). Yesterday’s dramatic selloff has been absurdly linked to consumer confidence numbers and “improving” economic fundamentals, as if bond rates .. read more
Greenspan Without Style
When I mentioned that Greenspan’s market has persisted long after his words fell from memory, that extended to overextended stock investors as well. By almost any measure, Ben Bernanke has outdone the “record” of his predecessor, yet he has so few quotable lines outside of those really bad predictions during the runup to the 2008 .. read more
