Real yields have moved higher, surging, actually, to start this year (up until more recently, that is). The 5-year TIPS rate has gone from ungodly ugly mid-November, sunk down to -191 bps, to a still-awful but much less so -130 bps as of today. That’s a 61 bps move in less than two months, thirty of those coming since the [...]
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche The new year got off to quite a bang last week. It was almost as if someone flipped a switch and investors/traders suddenly decided that all that stuff they believed last year was just so passe. Growth stocks? Nah, who wants [...]
Have oil producers shot themselves in the foot, while at the same time stabbing the global economy in the back? It’d be quite a feat if it turns out to be the case, one of those historical oddities that when anyone might honestly look back on it from the future still hung in disbelief. Let’s start by reviewing just the [...]
The headlines last Friday were ominous: Inflation Hits Highest Level in Nearly 40 Years Inflation is Painfully High... Groceries and Christmas Presents Are Going To Cost More Inflation is Soaring.. America's Inflation Burst This morning on Face The Nation, Mohamed El-Erian, former Harvard endowment manager, former bond king apprentice, economist, and the man who seems to have a permanent presence [...]
The bond market is imploding, right? It has to be going by everything you hear. Did you know that the last two 30-year bond auctions had gone “awry”, as one mainstream news outlet put it? Another "media" shop declared them “catastrophic.”The second of those long bond sales was conducted just yesterday afternoon, right in time to run into the buzzsaw [...]
The economic news recently has been better than expected and in most cases just pretty darn good. That isn't true on a global basis, as Europe continues to experience a pretty sluggish recovery from COVID. And China is busy shooting itself in the foot as Xi pursues the re-Maoing of Chinese society, damn the economic costs. But here in the [...]
This sour/soar stuff goes back many years. The last time we went through the same hysteria (if for different reasons), everyone said the global economy was going to accelerate, take off, and sail onward forever after. The world was, they all claimed, set to soar.Globally synchronized growth. The bond market didn’t just disagree, it did so vehemently, a pessimism when [...]
Here we go again. Or maybe, more accurately, here we go still. COVID has reared its ugly head again, this time in the form of a new variant called Omicron. The name surprised some folks because the next letter in the Greek alphabet was Nu, but the WHO thought that sounded too much like "new" so they skipped that one, [...]
Consumer sentiment hit a decade low last month, falling 6 points from an already low level. The culprit? Inflation, which we learned last week hit a 3 decade high in October. And if the founder of the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is right, the next thing we'll see is an economic slowdown. George Katona was a psychologist who [...]
For the first time since last December, the level of Job Openings (JO) pictured by the BLS’s JOLTS survey declined. End of the line for the economy?I am intentionally overselling this monthly minus. While the latest figure for September 2021 was indeed less than the one for August, if only because August’s estimate was raised by several hundred thousand. Going [...]
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