February was a very interesting month, wasn’t it? There was the pause or even end of the inflation hysteria driven home by “unexpected” liquidations in markets all over the world. On top of those, LIBOR-OIS blew out and all the absurd explanations put forth for it, and even outright lies. Needless to say (write), I’ve been waiting for the TIC [...]
On Friday I wrote: Again, the size of your reserves reflects, and is proportional to, your potential need for funding. You can’t accumulate that many unless you have a similarly arrayed “dollar short.” The bigger the stockpile the more potential for it to get out of hand if things go the wrong way (usually on the self-reinforcing cycle of rising [...]
Very early on in the turn, I mean very early, you could already tell there were substantial problems underneath. By the time CNY started lower, against all expectations, there had already been serious signs of trouble in China for months by then. In that initial seemingly minor drop in early 2014, the PBOC’s actions belied a stable system. If you knew [...]
In early 2015, a contract dispute between dockworkers’ unions and 29 ports on the West Coast of the US escalated into what was a slowdown strike. Cargoes piled up especially at some of the largest facilities like those in Oakland, LA, and Long Beach, threatening substantial economic costs far and away from just those directly involved. Each side predictably blamed [...]
The only way to change the meaning of a word like “transitory” is to put together a constant string of temporary factors that when taken individually keep with the traditional definition but in combination completely obliterate it. Something happens to knock inflation off track, and then just as soon as that one thing is about to abate and inflation is [...]
Friday, January 26, stocks hit their last record highs. Buoyed by supposedly strong earnings along with near euphoria about tax reform anecdotes, all three major US indices were sitting at their respective tops after another big week. Everything was apparently going in the right direction: All the three key U.S. indexes closed at record levels on Friday following better-than-expected earnings [...]
The Chinese government reported estimates for Industrial Production, Retail Sales, and Fixed Asset Investment (FAI) for both January and February 2018. The National Bureau of Statistics prepares and calculates China’s major economic statistics in this manner at the beginning of each year due to the difficulties created by calendar effects (New Year Golden Week). Despite this attempt to offset them, [...]
China’s General Administration of Customs reported that Chinese exports to all other countries were in February 2018 an incredible 44.5% more than they were in February 2017. Such a massive growth rate coming now has served to intensify the economic boom narrative. A strengthening U.S. recovery is helping underpin China’s outlook as Asia’s biggest economy seeks to cut excess capacity [...]
On October 31, 1997, the IMF announced a rescue for Indonesia. Though it was Thailand who caught the Asian flu first, it was this latter country where a monetary line in the sand was drawn. Nobody wanted to find out what a complete wipeout of the Indonesia rupiah might mean for financial conditions across Asia. Included in that category of [...]
The narrative for global growth, synchronized or not, doesn’t do well with JPY on the rise. Referred to as a safe haven, there should be no reason for an exchange value at a level not seen since late 2016. It flies in the face of the falling dollar, though in the case of yen, backwards as is usual, this particular [...]
Stay In Touch