Most Americans understandably have tunnel vision when it comes to the American CPI and what it might portend for their personal circumstances. Gasoline prices and those for anyone trying to buy a car or now rent some kind of shelter, the threat is immediate. From this palpable sense, the word “transitory” today might just seem offensive.Yet, it may prove itself [...]
Oil has easily, it appears, rebounded after having moved lower in November. It bottomed out that first big day of omicron fear on December 1 (ironically, or not, the same day the eurodollar futures curve inverted). Since a low of just over $65 (WTI), crude’s front futures price is easily back in the $80s thereby threatening to make January’s US [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
They were doing so well, or at least not quite as bad as throughout the prior several decades. Through this year’s 5% CPI’s, Federal Reserve policymakers stuck to their gut not their heart. Transitory factors. Right call (as we’ll see in a minute). That won’t be their mistake. On the contrary, these Economists (central bankers are all Economists nowadays, and [...]
The way it has been described since, yesterday’s CPI estimates for last month represented a seismic shift in the inflation debate. There is no more argument, apparently, and if that wasn’t apparent enough then today it was followed up with even more highly-touted evidence. Producer prices, the PPI, came up even more over-the-moon than those for consumers.The commodities portion, no [...]
Reopening 2 is definitely happening. The labor market, in particular, is sending off the same kind of signals if not to the same huge extent as it had during Reopening 1 in May and June of last year. The March 2021 payroll report was better than 900,000, and the one for April (last month) to be released tomorrow is expected [...]
With government cash being shoveled into personal and corporate bank accounts, US consumers have reported that they are being more optimistic about the state of the economy. Before that, they went on a spending binge as stated unequivocally by historic retail sales figures. Why, then, so much higher spending than improved happiness and certainty while going about it?The University of [...]
The sound of economic sizzle finally within earshot, though perhaps nearly a year too late. PMI’s for the month of March 2021 were of the sort which should have come about in May and June 2020. The “V”-shaped recovery was much talked about at that earlier time, though in PMI terms (as well as regular “hard” data) the numbers fell [...]
There is precedence for this, though not to this extent; it has reached a record. And when it happened before, oil prices were right in the middle of it, too. The 5-year TIPS breakeven rate has surged to equal its highest in a very long time. Considered by many evidence for an inflationary breakout – these are inflation breakevens, after [...]
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