Gosh, with so much excitement going on in the world between the bombs, missile strikes and false flags it was easy to miss last week’s US non-farm payroll release for March. Not that one would have missed much. Having delivered its much anticipated second rate increase in the current tightening cycle, the Fed no longer […]
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Markets attempt to discount the future, which for the present often means trying to anticipate what the new POTUS is up to. Unfortunately, when he is failing to deliver what he promised (Healthcare and tax reform), but doing what he explicitly said he wouldn’t (bombing Syria) one might be forgiven for wanting to move into […]
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Goldman have reportedly replaced 600 traders with 200 computer engineers since 2000. The ratio however, doesn’t look very efficient, so presumably they’re working on other projects such as AI, although once this is developed there may not be too much demand then for Javascript developers either. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603431/as-goldman-embraces-automation-even-the-masters-of-the-universe-are-threatened/ Hopefully, the programming and models will be […]
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After raising its Federal funds target range to 0.25-0.5% in December 2015, Yellen has waited exactly a year and now edged up rates a further +25bps as the target range is raised to 0.5-0.75%, while also signalling that these could rise to around 1.4% by the end of 2017, thereby suggesting three further +25bps increases […]
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Another month and another non-farm payroll number for markets to chew on. After what is now looking to be an abnormal data point for May, private sector employment growth has now posted a second month of gains at over 200k. Stretch this out over a year and we are still talking an average monthly increase […]
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Another month and another non-farm payroll number to interpret. Before you start to worry that the ‘better than expected’ MoM increase in private sector employment growth of +265k is going to accelerate the Fed’s interest rate tightening schedule, don’t. As usual, the numbers are open to interpretation as well as substantial revisions. The May […]
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If unplanned outages from Canada and Nigeria (of approx -2mb/d) have provided the supply side contraction behind the rebound in crude prices, China’s PBOC credit injection of $1tn in Q1 has helped to deliver the demand side component, which along with ECB and BoJ NIRP, have also helped keep the record levels of global inventories […]
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The Fed it seems is off the hook for an interest rate increase for at least another month after the May non-farm payroll number. At +38k of net additions for the month (+25k for private sector) and with March and April figures also restated down by -59k, this is hardly the escape velocity of a […]
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