Below we highlight a few takeaways from Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s confirmation hearing today before the Senate Banking Committee, broken down by topic. -Focus on “less accommodative” moves -Powell made numerous statements indicating that COVID, though prevalent, will not be as pressing in policy decisions…
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In this quarter’s strategy report, Forward Thinking 2022, we discuss the following: -US economic growth is expected to be quite robust in 2022, despite the disruptions from the Omicron variant. Capital spending is expected to lead economic growth, which makes sense as companies invest in…
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A basic tautology that economists consider when thinking about monetary policy is the velocity of money. MV=PQ translates into Money*Velocity=Price*Quantity. Of course, price*quantity is nominal GDP while “M” is the money supply (for example, M2) while “V” is velocity, or the number of times the…
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In this quarter’s strategy package, we share our analysis on Japan’s Reopening Trade. In the full slide presentation, we cover the following: -Japan seems to have crushed the COVID-19 virus (for now at least) with daily new cases under 400/day. Lockdowns are over and the…
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Fed funds futures for 2022 and 2023 have broken out to new highs, likely on the back of rising inflation expectations. As things stand now, the market is looking for three hikes by the end of 2023, with the effective fed funds moving from 8bps…
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In this Mid-Quarter Update, we discuss our analysis on the following topics: -Recent readings on consumer confidence have rolled over. The surveys are validated by the stagnation in real consumer spending in the last few months. -In conjunction with the slowdown in house sales and…
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We believe the technology sector is broadly breaking down. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the correlation between pure growth stocks and pure value stocks has plunged. This means that growth only explains about 5% of the movement in value stocks right…
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In this presentation, we outline our argument for gold entering a new structural bull market. Download the slides: Foundations for a New Structural Gold Bull Market.
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As funding strains appeared in March, the USD surged. Then the Fed stepped in with massive foreign exchange swaps as a way to lend USD to foreign central banks, intended to ultimately be lent to borrowers in need of USD. As F/X swaps reached almost…
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Since the March 23, 2020 low, when the Federal Reserve announced basically unlimited liquidity via a variety of programs, corporate spreads have narrowed, and the stock market has risen substantially. In the chart below, I overlay US investment grade spreads over the S&P 500 Index….
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While not 100% correlated, there tends to be a pretty good relationship between movements in the S&P 500 and credit spreads, both investment grade (IG) and high-yield (HY). As stocks sold off in February and March, credit spreads widened rapidly. And, then on March 23,…
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Despite the relief rally yesterday, financial conditions have tightened significantly in the last couple weeks. This likely explains why the Fed just made an emergency 50bps cut to the fed funds rate. The graph below highlights that the two main areas of weaker financial conditions…
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Former Fed Governor and now professor at the University of Rochester, Narayana Kocherlakota penned the following short opinion piece in Bloomberg this morning: Fed Shouldn’t Wait to Cut Interest Rates: Narayana Kocherlakota By Narayana Kocherlakota The world economy is facing a material risk in the…
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This morning the monthly job openings and labor turnover (JOLTS) report was released, and it came in significantly shy of expectations. While Bloomberg’s consensus estimate was for 6.925 million job openings, the actual number came in at 6.423. It is important to keep in mind…
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US corporate profits are down from the 2014 peak. In this mid-quarter special report, we dive deep into corporate profits, taxes, profit margins and the increasing government debt levels that have propelled stock and bond prices higher, in our view, leading to rising equity and government…
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