Brussels Alters Capital Requirements to “Spur Lending” Saints preserve us, the central planners in Brussels are giving birth to new inflationist ideas. Apparently the 2008 crisis wasn’t enough of a wake-up call. It should be clear by now even to the densest observers that a fractionally reserved banking system that flagrantly over-trades its capital is…
Let’s just get this out of the way now… The September jobs report was absolutely abysmal. The U.S. added 142,000 jobs last month, widely missing estimates for 200,000. What’s more, August’s lackluster report was revised lower by 40,000 to 136,000. Back-to-back weak jobs reports are the start of an ugly trend for the American economy. To make…
The stock market just finished a brutal third quarter… The S&P 500 fell 8%…and so did the Dow and the Nasdaq. It was the worst quarter for U.S. stocks since 2011. Stocks around the world dropped too. The MSCI All-Country World Index, which tracks 85% of global stocks, also had its worst quarter since 2011….
There is presently a bull market in complacency. There are very few alarm bells going off anywhere; and frankly, in reaction to my own personal complacency, I have my antenna up for whatever it is I might be missing that would indicate an approaching recession. It was very easy to call the last two recessions…
Treasury Yields Drop Again Curve Watcher’s Anonymous notes a further plunge in yields today following the disastrous payroll and factory order reports. Yield on the 30-year long bond fell to 2.80% from 2.85% yesterday. Yield on the 10-year note once again sports a 1-handle at 1.97%, down from 2.03%. Duration Current Yield Yield Month Ago…
Modern Monetary Theory has been revolutionary in economics, and its influence is — beneficially — ever-more pervasive. It has opened the eyes of a generation to a clear-eyed, accounting-based methodology that trumps dimensionless theory, and has brought a deep, nuts-and-bolts understanding of money, debt, and financial institutions to a discipline where that understanding has been inexcusably…
Rome – What are we doing in Rome? We’ll tell you Monday. That will give us time to figure it out… In the meantime, remember: Cash is king. It’s one of the best-performing major asset classes this year. It’s also – by far – the safest. Even billionaire investor Carl Icahn is now urging investors to…
Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen said it. At long last, she said Thursday, inflation is set to hit the central bank’s target. Not now, mind you, but in the years to come. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the wizards behind the green curtain levering the nation’s money supply, has a long-standing inflation objective of…
The most significant thing I’m seeing this week is my measures of risk strengthening amid large range days and high volatility. Market participants are getting comfortable with wide swings in their portfolios. The improvement in my measures of risk still aren’t enough to clear my market risk indicator, but a continued rally next week just might…
Since mid March the AAII bullish sentiment reading has been below its long term bullish average. As a contrarian indicator, low levels of bullish investor sentiment typically point to equity markets that are near their bottom. Keeping in mind though, this sentiment reading is most predicative at its extremes. Earlier this week, the AAII bullish reading declined…
