Tag Archives for " interest rates "

April Non-farm payrolls: how to turn +76k jobs into +194k

This is feeling like Groundhog day. Another monthly jobs report by the Dept of Labor showing strong employment growth and triggering a wall of narrative from the markets proclaiming the next rate rise like the second coming, but another conclusion based on what Trump might describe as ‘fake news’.  Were those who predicted April MoM […]

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Now you’ve been distracted, here’s the real US monthly job growth numbers

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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End of cycle warnings for marketing services

How many leading marketers know what return they’re getting on their marketing investment? From P&G marketing honcho, Marc Pritchard’s gripes about poor transparency and accountability and a “crappy media chain”, one might surmise not many. If you can’t trust the data on who is being reached, any resulting ROI calculation derived from it is therefore […]

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Fed rate rise – Cui Bono?

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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Auto & jobs slowdown in August – another excuse for the Fed not to raise rates!

Another month of hints about imminent interest rate increases by Yellen and the Fed leak machine and we are probably no closer to an actual rate increase. At least in July we had another relatively firm private sector job creation and US auto sales to suggest that the super-low rate environment was well past its […]

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US employment data for July – rate fears over-done (again)

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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June US non-farm payrolls beat expectations! But did they?

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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Looking beyond central bank interference in equity valuations

Behind the incessant background noise of Yellen’s ‘will she won’t she raise rates’ discussion, the closing of the Q1 results season provides a good opportunity to take stock of the broader earnings and more importantly OpFCF yield basis on which equities are priced. Relative to expectations at the start of the year, there have been […]

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