Few were surprised when the ECB made a 25bps rate hike announcement yesterday. The move was aligned with analyst expectations, and in the face of 6.1% year-over-year Euro Area inflation, there was little room for ECB President Christine LaGarde to follow US Fed Chair Jerome...
China reported year-over-year inflation last night at just 0.1%, 0.2% lower than expectations. Clearly China’s reopening is not creating price pressures, which brings the strength of the reopening into some question. Recently, we saw a fairly significant drop in China’s PMIs—all of them well below 50—indicating...
Headline CPI came in today as expected at 0.4%, however core inflation (ex food and energy) came in slightly higher at 0.5% versus the estimated 0.4% increase. Before the Silicon Valley Bank failure and currently ongoing banking rout unfolded last week, Jerome Powell said he...
We just experienced the fastest bank run in history with the closure of Silicon Valley Bank. Apparently over 40% of the company’s deposits fled last Thursday and early Friday before closure. To put this is context, when Continental Illinois—at the time, the largest ever bank...
The Atlanta Fed Flexible CPI is a price series developed by the Atlanta Fed to capture the price of items that change the most frequently. This price series is supposed to be more responsive to real-time changes in the economy than the CPI, so generally,...
Tomorrow we get the consumer price index year-over-year for January, with expectations for 7.25%. This would take the CPI to a new high for the cycle, rising from 7% year-over-year from December. We would like to see the print undershoot and offer several reasons why it...
Since May 2020, the Chinese Yuan has defied the path of other emerging market currencies, strengthening by almost 12%. This has left it overvalued compared to other emerging market countries. While Yuan strength made sense in 2020 when the USD was weakening. It is curious that in...
While we recognize that the negative year-over-year change in the US CPI may soon reverse given gas prices have risen by nearly 30 cents, we wanted to highlight how rare a negative year-over-year print is in the US....
Last week we wrote a few posts here, here and here noting the significant deterioration in EPS and sales growth estimates over the last few months....
Last month we mentioned how world inflation had reached a 56-month low. Well, the latest data (through August) shows world inflation, by our simple average of 33 countries year-over-year change in CPI, is creeping lower again. The latest reading stands at 1.65%....
The NAHB Housing Market Index increased to 58 to post the highest number since August, which is also the highest level of the recovery. The HMI correlates pretty well with house prices. And house prices, in turn, tend to lead CPI Owner’s Equivalent Rent....
Important survey data out of Europe today points to a growing disparity between the region’s two largest economies....
Inflation is low around the world. According to our simple average of 33 CPIs (and 22 PPIs) inflation has been falling for the past four months. Not surprising then, inflation surprises are negative as well....
Mortgage apps and existing home sales both fell. Mortgage apps dropped 2.3% week-over-week while existing home sales it’s first 3-month decline since May 2011. The year-over-year change in the CPI fell to a four-year low. Other than the negative CPI prints in 2009, this is...
