The 10 year Treasury yield has been in an uptrend since the summer of 2021 which is obvious to anyone who can see. It has stalled a couple of times and moved sideways - consolidated in Wall Street technical speak - but the trend is obvious (see below). It seems only a matter of time before we break above the [...]
Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. Warren Buffett People are always asking me where's the outlook good, but that's the wrong question. The right question is: Where is the outlook the most miserable? Sir John Templeton, The Principle of Maximum Pessimism I don't know if we're at the point of maximum pessimism yet but [...]
The yield curve's inverted! The yield curve's inverted! That was the news I awoke to last Wednesday on CNBC as the 10 year Treasury note yield dipped below the 2 year yield for the first time since 2007. That's the sign everyone has been waiting for, the definitive recession signal that says get out while the getting is good. And [...]
The economic data reported over the last month managed to confirm both that the economy is slowing and that there seems little reason to fear recession at this point. The slowdown is mostly a manufacturing affair - and some of that is actually a fracking slowdown - but consumption has also slowed. On a more positive note, housing seems to [...]
The housing bubble began to reverse in the middle of 2006. Strangely, Economists presented with the possibility were almost uniformly confident that it wouldn’t matter. Forgetting the market and liquidity issues, even by the middle of 2007 it was clear the end of the housing bubble had already restrained economic growth. Confidence abounded anyway, largely a result of the mistaken [...]
If China and US manufacturing are suffering from what looks like the contours of a slowly progressing recession, we don’t have to go very far to find the genesis. The common denominator is and has been US consumers. That much is evident in very clear fashion through retail sales during the Christmas season that were abysmal. The BEA’s update for [...]
Michal Kalecki was a Polish economist whose work in the 1930’s earned him (for what it may be worth) the distinction of being Keynes before Keynes. In other words, because Kalecki was publishing papers and giving lectures in Polish rather than English, his arrival at the same conclusions and outlooks before Keynes in the UK was largely unnoticed. He was [...]
In anticipation of tomorrow’s jobs frenzy, with all attention fixed to a statistic that was never meant to convey meaning in the current predicament (the unemployment rate is not supposed to be driven by the denominator), a review of context is in order. That is particularly true as I have detailed recent indications of a foul and maladroit trajectory for [...]
Janet Yellen appeared before the Senate last week in the first step toward her apparent crowning as the new head of the Federal Reserve. The Senate Banking Committee asked a few tough questions but in general it was a love fest and no wonder. Quantitative easing has helped no group more than the politicians and the federal government they direct. [...]
I’ve gotten a few emails asking for more detail on why the market structure seems to have changed or evolved since about 1990, particularly that relation to the Federal Reserve’s full implementation of interest rate targeting. Coincidence and correlation is not always causation, so it is useful to unpack the full chain of circumstances between them to get a better [...]
Stay In Touch