While many seemed to focus on the basics of the employment report like average hourly earnings (which don’t take into consideration industry mix shifts among the employed) and the payroll job beat for the month, there is one very important variable that revealed the weakness…
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There are many ways to decompose the bond market to identify the component pieces to infer what the market is pricing in. The nominal long US Treasury bond is a function of two things: 1) the average expected future nominal short-term interest rate, and 2)…
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The Federal Reserve has been raising rates at an extremely aggressive manner in 2022, taking the federal funds rate from 25bps to 4%. At the same time, they have been letting assets run off their balance sheet in quantitative tightening. This double-barreled tightening is likely…
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Last night, the Reserve Bank of Australia stopped short of another 50bps hike to its overnight cash rate. The RBA’s statement contained one nugget that helps explain its decision: “One source of uncertainty is the outlook for the global economy, which has deteriorated recently.” While…
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This is the name of a recent research piece from the San Francisco Federal Reserve written by Adam Shapiro. The paper attempts to separate supply and demand factors to evaluate which is causing the elevated rate of inflation. The paper concludes that supply factors are…
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Given all the confusion in the world around COVID, supply chains, inflation dynamics and war, there are lots of potential externalities that could resolve themselves unexpectedly. We call this the Deus ex Machina scenario. Our analysis follows in our Mid-Quarter Update. Prefer to download this presentation…
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Over the weekend, we got a slew of data showing a generally weak economy. Below are the actual data compared with the expectations from Bloomberg. Of course, the headline grabber was the -31.4% drop in residential property sales, but across the board, from industrial production…
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Since the COVID low in US Treasury rates and subsequent rise, the Japanese Yen has tracked the yield differential between the US and Japan. With the Federal Reserve having embarked on a rate hiking cycle, the monetary policy divergence between the US and Japan has…
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The President today asked Congress for a gasoline tax holiday to alleviate the cost of gasoline and diesel in the country. This is not the solution. With the exception of a 200,000 barrel/day refinery in Garyville, Louisiana, built by Marathon Petroleum in July 2020, there…
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Crude oil and energy equities have been on a tear for the last two years. But now we are seeing some divergences between oil prices and other related variables. First, as everyone knows, oil prices have been the main driver of rising bond yields this…
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As everyone knows, the labor market has been quite strong, with expectations for the unemployment rate to fall further next week. Much has been made of the relationship between job openings and unemployed people that are in the labor force. The ratio of job openings…
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All year inflation has been the narrative driving markets. Since December 2021, once the Bloomberg Commodity Index (BCOM) took off, rates have risen in tandem. But, interestingly enough the BCOM has been flat since peaking on March 8, 2022. Every day we seem to be…
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Just today, as US inflation came in a touch hotter than expected, the Chinese Yuan is pulling lower, testing the lows of May 9, 2022. The five-day rate of change is fairly extreme by anything we’ve seen over the last few years. The last time…
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Today the Federal Open Market Committee raised the fed funds rate (upper bound) to 1% from 50bps. The most surprising element of the press conference was the Chairman dismissing that the committee is not “actively” considering a 75bps hike right now. This sent algos into…
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The clear and present danger to the global economy is inflation because global central banks are starting to take aggressive actions to deal with what they now believe to be non-transitory inflation. The Fed funds futures curve is signaling a tightening campaign not seen since…
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