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Macro: Sep CPI stuck at 3.7% YOY

By |2023-10-13T03:39:59-04:00October 12th, 2023|Markets|

The most anticipated release of the week came in ... "Unchanged" or sticky stuck from August at 3.7% yoy. But it's worth mentioning as we will discuss below that this is up from June CPI which was 3.09% yoy. Core CPI which excludes food and energy because of their volatility sits at 4.13% yoy down from 4.39% last month. Let's [...]

Are Central Bankers About To Spike The Ball At The 30-yard line (again)?

By |2022-02-22T18:50:50-05:00February 22nd, 2022|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Nobody, and I mean nobody, does premature celebrations like central bankers. When it comes to their non-money monetary policies and the inflation they seek to create from them, time and again officials in every jurisdiction spike the ball at least 30 yards before they reach the endzone. Whenever one or another consumer price measure ticks up, or accelerates dramatically as [...]

Finding Tame American Inflation In Chinese Industrial Sentiment

By |2021-04-30T16:36:39-04:00April 30th, 2021|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Trillions in “stimulus”, American consumers buying goods at a frenetic pace (in lieu of services), gasoline prices punishing, the start of favorable base effects, yet all those things couldn’t push the inflation rate much further beyond the Federal Reserve’s 2% explicit target. And remember, in order to meet the newly designed economic goals on the inflation side – average inflation [...]

A Big One For The Big “D”

By |2020-05-12T18:14:45-04:00May 12th, 2020|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

From a monetary policy perspective, smooth is what you are aiming for. What central bankers want in this age of expectations management is for a little bit of steady inflation. Why not zero? Because, they decided, policymakers need some margin of error. Since there is no money in monetary policy, it takes time for oblique “stimulus” signals to feed into [...]

When Verizons Multiply, Macro In Inflation

By |2019-06-12T16:20:26-04:00June 12th, 2019|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Inflation always brings out an emotional response. Far be it for me to defend Economists, but their concept is at least valid – if not always executed convincingly insofar as being measurable. An inflation index can be as meaningful as averaging the telephone numbers in a phone book (for anyone who remembers what those things were). If you spend $1,000 [...]

The Light And The Dark

By |2019-01-23T17:07:26-05:00January 23rd, 2019|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

A year ago, central bankers were over the moon. From those in the US to those in Europe, with Japanese officials in between, they really thought they had it. There wasn’t much basis for the belief, mind you, merely the fact that positive numbers were registering in all those places at the same time. Like some old Three Stooges movie, [...]

Raining On Chinese Prices

By |2018-10-16T16:36:51-04:00October 16th, 2018|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

It was for a time a somewhat curious dilemma. When it rains it pours, they always say, and for China toward the end of 2015 it was a real cloudburst. The Chinese economy was slowing, dangerous deflation developing around an economy captured by an unseen anchor intent on causing havoc and destruction. At the same time, consumer prices were jumping [...]

China Prices Include Lots of Base Effect, Still Undershoots

By |2018-03-09T17:04:12-05:00March 9th, 2018|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

By far, the easiest to answer for today’s inflation/boom trifecta is China’s CPI. At 2.9% in February 2018, that’s the closest it has come to the government’s definition of price stability (3%) since October 2013. That, in the mainstream, demands the description “hot” if not “sizzling” even though it still undershoots. The primary reason behind the seeming acceleration was a [...]

Inflation Correlations and China’s Brief, Disappointing Porcine Nightmare

By |2018-01-10T18:16:02-05:00January 10th, 2018|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Two years ago, China was gripped by what was described as an epic pig problem. For most Chinese people, pork is a main staple so rapidly rising pig prices could have presented a serious challenge to an economy already at that time besieged by massive negative forces. It was another headache officials in that country really didn’t need. For economists [...]

Japan Follows Brazil

By |2013-07-26T11:07:53-04:00July 26th, 2013|Markets|

Apparently it is time to celebrate inflation, however it might be defined. Inflation is looked on no longer as the bane of central bankers, but their reason to exist.  This is now near universal, as one after another nation is forced by central banks to appeal to debasement as economic salvation.  On the surface, it looks as if the Bank [...]

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