The fact that German retail sales crashed so much in April 2022 is significant for a couple reasons. First, it more than suggests something is wrong with Germany, and not just some run-of-the-mill hiccup. Second, because it was this April rather than last April or last summer, you can’t blame COVID this time. Something else is going on.In America, the [...]
The US Treasury curve, as you might have heard, is inverted. After today’s repeat sell-off, it’s a little less inverted than it had been recently (un-inverted in the 2s10s, which isn’t unusual) given how yields closed at the longer end up more than those up front and middle. The zig-zag back and forth of ultra-short run market fluctuations continues.But what [...]
I’m not much for writing, so I’m sure nothing of a song-writer. While that may be the case, what I do know is that two of the missing lines in our Twelve Warnings of Deflation carol would belong to JGB’s and oil. How to fit them in, someone else would have to do so; the number we’d associate for JGB [...]
This wasn’t meant to be a running tally. In fact, that was my major point in yesterday’s curve inversion missive; the thing inverted, it stayed inverted for a second day but maybe won’t change much for some time moving forward. Boring and consistent, what matters most in this first stage is only that the inversion sticks rather than expecting big [...]
Central banks and their staffs have long been accused of trying to hide inflation. This allegation had been a staple of their critics, those charging reckless monetary policies for creating “too much” money that had allegedly been causing price imbalances all over the financial map. The most famous example the Federal Reserve discontinuing M3 early in 2006 – just as [...]
Being able to compare European inflation rates with their American counterparts helps expose what’s driving the latter and it’s not inflationary currency. Comparing both of those inflation regimes with the Japanese simply exposes the Bank of Japan and QE. This was perfectly obvious before the Base 2020 CPI estimates came about.Central banks, we’re always told, possess the printing press of [...]
Admittedly, there isn’t much economic data released in the back half of every month. So, we’re sort of stretching our gaze into the second (maybe third) tier. But in this case, it’s just by way of reinforcing much what we already know and further what’s been suspected. Over in Japan, the government’s Cabinet Office gathers surveys, cross tabulates results and [...]
Central bankers nearly everywhere have succumbed to recovery fever. This has been a common occurrence among their cohort ever since the earliest days of the crisis; the first one. Many of them, or their predecessors, since this standard of fantasyland has gone on for so long, had caught the malady as early as 2007 and 2008 when the world was [...]
Yield curve control, remember that one? For a little while earlier this year, the modestly reflationary selloff in bonds around the world was prematurely oversold as some historically significant beginning to a massive, conclusive regime change. Inflation had finally been achieved across multiple geographies, it was widely repeated, and this would create problems, purportedly, as these various places would have [...]
Consumer prices in Japan fell again in May, according to that country’s Ministry of Finance. The headline CPI was 0.1% less last month than it had been in the same month during 2020. Though it was the eighth straight for outright deflation, there was some good news in the core rate, if you could call it that, which flipped to [...]
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