Inflation* in the US is falling rapidly with the CPI rising just 0.9% in the second half of 2022 versus 5.4% in the first six months. Existing home sales are down 14.6% in the last 3 months and 34% over the last year. Housing starts are down 22% and permits are down 30% year-over-year. Orders for durable goods are down [...]
When we think about the challenges facing an investor today, the big problems, the things we worry about that could cause a lot more harm than some interest rate hikes, are mostly outside the United States. China is prominent this weekend because of demonstrations against their zero-COVID policies. The Chinese people appear to be pretty well fed up with the [...]
Crude oil prices rose over 25% last week and as I sit down to write this evening, the overnight futures are up another 8% to around $125. Almost every other commodity on the planet rose in prices last week too, as did the dollar. Those two factors - rising dollar and rising commodity prices - mean the likelihood of recession [...]
Back in early June 2018, the Brazilian real was in free-fall (again). Never bothering to explain why or what was happening, the country’s top central banker just gathered the media together in front of him confident in how what he’d say to its members would be reported as fact. As it was. Not just by Brazil’s press, either. Even if [...]
The way you hear it nowadays, the dollar just can’t catch a break. If it’s not a load of “V’s” indicated by some obscure data point (like the otherworldly spike in US home ownership levels), then it is Jay Powell who is clearly gunning for the US currency. He can’t kill it fast enough, having had more than enough of [...]
One small silver lining to the current situation, while Jay Powell is busily trying to sell you his inflation fantasy, he’s actually undermining it at the very same time. No mere challenge to his own “money printing” fiction, either, the Fed’s Chairman is actively disproving the entire enterprise. While he says what he says, pay close attention instead to what [...]
As France’s Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde objected strenuously to Ben Bernanke’s second act. Hinted at in August 2010, QE2 was finally unleashed in November to global condemnation. Where “trade wars” fill media pages today, “currency wars” did back then. The Americans were undertaking beggar-thy-neighbor policies to unfairly weaken the dollar. The neighbor everyone though most likely to be sponged off [...]
The entire point of leveraged positions is the margin of safety. That is true on both sides of that equation, as for the provider and the borrower/user. In the most famous examples of collapse, from AIG to LTCM losses were never really the issue. None of them could withstand instead collateral calls to their liquidity reserves. As noted last week, [...]
The link between stock prices and oil has been especially high of late, and that has left quite a few traders and experts stumped. For a good long while any impact from oil was denied as only “transitory” or even helpful to consumers through some sort of “tax cut” effect. In January 2016, however, liquidations appeared regularly in one alongside [...]
The fact that there is almost universal recognition of a “manufacturing recession” not just here but spreading across the world is a significant change. After resisting and ignoring as much as possible for more than a year, economic weakness is now no longer unthinkable. This is, however, no mere academic exercise as there are very real consequences as the former [...]
Stay In Touch