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April US employment growth – Goldilocks
There seems to be a whole industry that has emerged to pore over the monthly US non-farm payroll numbers, but ultimately there are only two things of interest. Are US corporate sacking enough employees to signal an impending recession, or employing so many and paying so much as to spook the Fed into tightening monetary […]
Continue readingWeaning consumers off the debt fix – maybe
Well that seemed short-lived. Perhaps the bounce in US equity markets on the February non-farms was just a one day wonder. The numbers however, weren’t too shabby for equity prices; the combination of a better than expected net job growth (including upward revision in the January guesstimate), but with a lower pace of average wage […]
Continue readingAre equity markets expensive?
This is a regular question posed by investors and market commentators, but in many ways is also the most meaningless. This is because the relative merits of equities as an asset class owes more to the ebb and flow of liquidity to goose demand, rather than some theoretical notion of a ‘correct’ valuation that should […]
Continue reading“US Economy added only 148k jobs in December” …… Oh really?
A new year it may be, but don’t expect much improvement in the headline analysis of spurious government statistics. On Friday we had the December non-farm payroll figures. The headline net job additions was ‘only’ +148k in the month, which CNBC, the WSJ and other main media were quick to inform us was below the […]
Continue readingNovember US non-farm payrolls – a positive mix for equities
On balance, November’s non-farm payroll numbers were as good as might have been hoped for, at least for equities. Whilst the progress of the tax reforms, which offer to drop Federal corporation tax rates by 15ppts (from 35% to only 20%) are clearly more relevant to both valuations and FCF assumptions, the improved […]
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Bitcoin pyramid – a child of its time
There’s something almost comical about the law of unintended consequences. After nearly a decade of central bank intervention and manipulation of the market pricing of capital, should we be surprised that Bitcoin is now worth more than Proctor & Gamble? Having destroyed the market’s pricing of risk and replaced it with the moral hazard of […]
Continue readingUS September jobs data – never let a hurricane go to waste!
Never let a good hurricane go to waste. So when a couple turn up within a few weeks of each other (Harvey hitting Texas on 25th August and Irma skimming Western Florida on the 10th September) no one is going to take the estimated employment data for September as being particularly indicative of the underlying […]
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