Your cares and troubles are gone There'll be no more from now on! Happy days are here again! The skies above are clear again Let us sing a song of cheer again Happy days are here again! Lyrics: Jack Yellen, Music: Milton Ager That's certainly how it's felt since the turn of the new year with the NASDAQ up nearly [...]
The inflation report last week was met with a big sigh of relief by investors. Stocks and bonds rallied as the Fed's Whip Inflation Now project seems to be finally bearing some fruit. In reality, inflation peaked months ago but the Fed hadn't really caught on yet - they're a little slow - and the market has been fearing that [...]
History never repeats itself. Man always does. Voltaire Mark Twain is credited with a similar saying, that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. Of course, there is scant evidence that Clemens said anything of the sort just as Voltaire may or may not have penned the quote above. But both men were much wittier than I - than most - [...]
The employment report released last Friday was better than expected but the response by bulls and bears alike was exactly as expected. Both found things in the report to support their preconceived notions about the state of the economy. I do think the bulls had the better case on this particular report but there have been plenty of others recently [...]
What is the consensus about the economy today? Will 2022 growth be better or worse than 2021? Actually, that probably isn't the right question because the economy slowed significantly in the second half of 2021. The real question is whether growth will improve from that reduced pace. The Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker now has Q4 growth all the way down [...]
The first half of 2021 was inundated with government helicopters, more QE’s, and then CPI’s put up with guarantees the “inflation” was going to continue for a long time. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s often hapless CEO, proudly declared US Treasuries beyond the touch of any 10-foot pole. With the economy on fire, he “reasoned”, who would ever want safe and [...]
When the ECB’s leadership presented their first QE to the assembled media on March 5, 2015, there was a lot of the usual corporate-speak. It sure wasn’t fedspeak, the purposefully obfuscating wordsmithing of the kind made infamous by Alan Greenspan. No, on this occasion, to the contrary, Mario Draghi, the ECB’s President, wanted to be perfectly clear in what he [...]
It’s incredible, in a way, because right from the start he’s got everything on his side. There are the media write-ups which all say the exact same thing, calling this an exact science being practiced by the wisest, most considerate stewards. The legend we’ve been raised with. Lore and scholarship (I repeat myself). Most of all, everyone. When everyone says [...]
We often forget, the middle 2000’s was not uniquely a housing bubble. It commanded our attention because that’s what ended up affecting so many Americans personally; whether foreclosures or just the negative “wealth effect” of declining real estate values. This was also pretty easy to understand, an asset bubble though complicated in its full manifestations intuitive as a result. There [...]
The focus on China and the Chinese economy is not just related to its size but more so the fact that it is the pivot point for the whole global system. In pure economic terms, as “end demand” from the developed world economies slows, the Chinese economy either absorbs that reduction (through its own internal “stimulus”) or passes it on [...]
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