- Home /
- interest rates
Gold slumps – forming a ‘Macron bottom’?
So what’s up with the Gold price, which has tumbled by approx -5% in less than 48 hours? While 10 year US treasury yields are barely changed, a falling gold price on a rising US dollar suggests the Fed may be forced kicking and screaming back onto a monetary tightening tack and this also seems […]
Continue readingWar by other means – interest rates
War by other means? Forget the South China sea, Syria or Korea. If you haven’t noticed, the EU and China are locked in a high stakes game of chicken with the US over control of the World’s reserve currency, where the weapon of choice are interest rates. While much has been made of Trump’s attempts […]
Continue readingJune US jobs data – surprisingly stable
Yes, its out; the US non-farm payrolls for June. In between love island, the World Cup footie and what counts as financial porn (endless tit-for tat negotiations on tariffs and Brexit) you might have missed these. For those fretting about interest rate rises on an overheating employment market, I shouldn’t worry too much that it […]
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 […]
Continue readingUS adds +205k jobs in July – normally a positive for the US dollar, but now?
The problem of communicating a softening macro outlook is that it lowers interest rate expectations which in turn is a buy signal for not just investors, but also recruiters. So while the IMF cut its US GDP expectations for 2017 and 2018 by -20bps and -30bps respectively (both now to +2.1%) and currency markets have ‘drumfped’ […]
Continue readingYellen does virtuous – 5 years too late!
Confused? Well you should be be if you’ve been believing the usual output from the Federal Reserve. Contrary to the narrative of robust US economic growth and tightening labour markets requiring a normalisation of interest rates, things aren’t quite as rosy as Ms Yellen had been suggesting. Behind the increasingly absurd non-farm payroll data with […]
Continue readingUK consumers running on empty
If the UK consumer expenditure numbers reported by VISA in mid June suggest a stalling domestic economy, last week’s ONS release of the UK household savings ratio for Q1 suggests piggy banks are having to be raided to fund what little growth in expenditures we are seeing. This all seems a World away from the […]
Continue readingWazzup – 12th June 2017
Theresa may have to eat crow when she dines with newly elected Macron tomorrow, but the more immediate driver to markets this week will be whether the Fed raises rates on Wednesday despite weak inflation, GDP and net job growth. For the UK, weak sterling and consumer expenditure growth figures from VISA suggest continued pressure […]
Continue reading