All that Glitters
In December 2009 as the gold price was inexorably rising in the face of central bank currency debasement, called QE, we started to get scare stories about fake gold. A decade later and the Fed is back to its old tricks again and investors are rushing into the yellow stuff to preserve capital and once […]
Continue readingMore fake statistics!
In war, the first casualty is often the truth. In the current pandemic and polarised political environment, this seems to be doubly so. Pre-existing conditions might be what kills you with COVID-19, but it is the pre-existing political bias and goal-seeking that is more alarming. Don’t expect the data to lead the narrative. Want Biden […]
Continue readingVE day jobs carnage
It didn’t come as a surprise, but perhaps it was fitting that the carnage in job markets would be confirmed on the 75th anniversary of VE day, as Western Governments achieve a level of economic collapse and authoritarian rule that the Nazi’s could only have dreamt of. 75 years ago our predecessors faced terrible odds […]
Continue readingGrasping straws
“Stocks jump as global coronavirus case growth slows” blasts the headline from Yahoo this morning (Monday 6th April). With much of the western World under various forms of house arrest for weeks now, this should hardly come as a great surprise, but it tells us little on how and when we might be able to […]
Continue readingWhen governments panic
The -713k contraction in US private sector employment in March was as dire as expected, but after the approx +6.4m increase in initial unemployment claims already reported in the two weeks up to the 28th March, this represents merely an hors d’oeuvre to what is coming down the pipe, With only limited effective testing (including […]
Continue readingThe shape of things to come?
This QuickTake by Bloomberg video drive-thru of Wuhan paints an eeerily post-apocalyptic image that might be straight out of Twelve Monkeys or The Omega Man. My first reaction was to avoid any stock that needs to bring people together (restaurants, cinemas, airlines, event organisers, hotels etc) as the public reaction to this coronavirus is clearly […]
Continue readingRepo fixed – really?
Often referred to as the plumbing behind the financial markets, a better analogy for the US repo market would perhaps be as sausage making. That is because knowing how it’s made might deter one from having the confidence to consume it. With Federal Fund and repo rates both back down to within the Fed’s 1.50-1.75% […]
Continue readingChoices
“Everything is awesome” it seems for equities. An accommodating central bank, another goldilocks US jobs number, reducing trade tensions, de-escalating war drums in the Gulf and also reducing political risk as the US seems on track to follow the UK by keeping the fiscal crazies away from the government purse strings, when they go to […]
Continue reading