There were some wild, unprecedented - frankly stunning - swings in some very large, high-profile stocks last week. The press concentrated on Meta, nee Facebook, and Amazon as the yin and yang, the negative and positive, of the market. Facebook (how long before Zuckerberg abandons Meta? I give it a year) managed to lose a quarter of a trillion dollars [...]
Six months ago, the US was still reporting 226K new cases of COVID a day, a rate that would peak in the first half of January at over 300k. Daily deaths also peaked in those first two weeks of the new year at over 4000. The economy was still struggling to recover, most restaurants surviving on takeout traffic, and no [...]
This is a holiday-shortened week in the US but there is some important data on tap. Retail sales are expected to show a month-to-month rise for the first time since September. Year-over-year numbers remain pretty subdued and likely will until life returns to something resembling normal. Producer prices will likely rise but inflation continues its benign ways. It is likely [...]
One of the biggest challenges facing central banks in this increasingly post-myth environment is that they have to deal with the consequences of those past myths. Not all that long ago, it was widely believed that a central bank just did what it wanted to do, and that was the end of all discussion. If the Federal Reserve wanted to [...]
Two weeks ago, Chinese stock futures traded in Hong Kong flash crashed. Between 2:14pm and 2:16pm local time on May 17, the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index suddenly liquidated due to an intense burst of sell orders that crashed through the whole of the futures market depth. At the start, the index was trading at around +1% but fell to [...]
There does seem to be internal financing adjustments going on inside the arcane and cumbersome framework of CNY to US$. Whether or not that is desirable remains to be seen, but the case of the past few weeks suggests, and somewhat strongly, that the PBOC is again losing control. What it is almost certainly like trying to squeeze a balloon, [...]
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