Quirks or kinks in the eurodollar futures curve are nothing new, materializing from time to time as much for technical reasons as anything else. Still, there are those instances – such as June 2018 – when these represent meaningful changes in outlook and condition. Back in the middle of that year, the sudden inversion in the curve along the 2020-21 [...]
Consumer prices in Japan fell again in May, according to that country’s Ministry of Finance. The headline CPI was 0.1% less last month than it had been in the same month during 2020. Though it was the eighth straight for outright deflation, there was some good news in the core rate, if you could call it that, which flipped to [...]
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 [...]
When their paper came out in January 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff put a number on bond vigilantism as it had been known in prior history. The idea behind investor fickleness was simple and intuitive: profligate governments who finance their ill spending ways by borrowing will literally end up paying the price once the exceed common sense. And when [...]
Given the historic data for US retail sales, “somehow” the bond market ignored them yesterday (and today). Yields globally fell for the most part, with real yields (TIPS) really discounting the significance of consumers in March. Bonds aren’t buying that this is anything other than temporary.Not surprisingly, the mainstream media refuses not to buy what bonds aren’t. I mean, for [...]
On February 23, the US Treasury sold off $60 billion and change of 2-year notes (CUSIP 91282CBN0). This particular shorter-term instrument has been in the crosshairs of the reflation trade, lurching in and out of it going back to last October, perhaps even late September. Caught up being the immediate tenor following the bills which have been bid (for “some” [...]
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 [...]
In theory, it goes like this: QE or any sort of large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) undertaken by a central bank is needed during times of trouble in order to reduce interest rates in general. Buying bonds seems like it would lower yields, and lower yields mean more accommodative credit, therefore a boost to the real economy.So simple, straightforward, and intuitive, [...]
They were never very specific to begin with, even in Ben Bernanke’s infamous November 2010 Post op-ed covering the start of QE2. Officials like to keep it purposefully vague as a kind of dry powder, a margin for error. If bureaucrats become too specific, the public would reasonably hold them to their own standard being laid out. The point behind [...]
Between November 1998 and February 1999, Japan’s government bond (JGB) market was utterly decimated. You want to find an historical example of a real bond rout (no caps nor exclamations necessary), take a look at what happened during those three exhilarating (if you were a government official) months. The JGB 10-year yield had dropped to a low of just 77.2 [...]
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