For the first time since March we are seeing a positive correlation between bond yields and reverse repos sold by the Fed. The change started during the last week of October and has continued throughout November. The correlation in March coincided with bank failures, mainly Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. In between March and the end of October, the [...]
Like a child fixated on a shiny new toy, I was enthralled by trading in WTI futures on Monday. There are times when end-of-day closing prices just don’t capture the full extent of what actually goes on during the several hours of any regular session, and yesterday was certainly one of those times. We’ve been on top of front-end contango [...]
This is not a man who’s comfortable thrust into a position of leadership. Say what you want about Ben Bernanke, and there’s a lot that still needs to be said, he at least carried on with the arrogance through thick and thin (almost entirely the latter). Jay Powell sounds like a boxer who just realized the lightweight he thought he [...]
According to analysts and economists who watch these things, Germany’s IFO Business Climate Index was expected to continue its rise. Having purportedly bottomed out back in September, like other sentiment indicators this one had been on the rebound, too, if, though, much less than those others (especially the “stimulus” loving ZEW). While maybe not suggesting the turnaround we had been [...]
As I so often write, we still talk about 2008 because we aren’t yet done with 2008. It doesn’t seem possible to be stuck in a time warp of such immense proportions, but such are the mistakes of the last decade carrying with them just these kinds of enormous costs. It has been this way from the beginning, even before [...]
The idea that interest rates have nowhere to go but up is very much like saying the bond market has it all wrong. That is one reason why the rhetoric has been ratcheted that much higher of late, particularly since the Fed “raised rates” for a third time in March. Such “hawkishness” by convention should not go so unnoticed, and [...]
Adding to the repo observations from this morning regarding illiquidity and more importantly gathering risk aversion, the behavior of corporate bonds and spreads matches that overall sketch very closely. The key point is how different the corporate bond space, like the UST curve, has behaved in 2014 in relation to 2013. In past periods just prior to recessions, you see [...]
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a former member of the ECB’s executive board, raised some ire last month when he was quoted at the IMF’s spring meeting saying, “We don’t fully understand what is happening in advanced economies.” Such a statement drew so much attention largely because a significant number and proportion of investors, observers and professionals highly agree with him. Central [...]
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