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Yellen 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 readingEnergy politics and fickle friends
Energy politics makes for fickle friends. A decade ago, Qatar was the US administration’s BFF, with its invitation to relocate the US regional military base from Saudi Arabia to Qatar in return for support to secure a pipeline access through Syria for its soon to be expanding natural gas production. As a way of pricking […]
Continue readingDonny two scoops
Forget Trump sacking FBI chief Comey or the occasional missile strike on another’s sovereign territory, the mainstream media has now got their teeth into something really big. Don’t tell the kids, but he gets two scoops of ice cream, while the journalists only got one! The Don seems to have attracted a new and more […]
Continue readingWhen you need to believe the ‘crazies’ are in control
Management by chaos . Did anyone seriously believe that Trump would be able to get his ambitious stimulus plan through Congress if the economy was chugging along nicely as Yellen was continuing to portray? It was almost as implausible as expecting the EU to offer a painless Brexit for the UK while they remain convinced we […]
Continue readingPOTUS missile attack on Syria – more Kabuki theatre than prelude to WW3
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 […]
Continue readingTrump and hot air lift February US jobs data – but will this be enough to justify a rate rise?
Does anyone not expect a March rate increase? After raising its Q1 GDP estimate from +3.09% to +3.19%, the +227k net private sector job adds reported in yesterday’s non-farm payroll data for February (after the +298k already reported mid-week by ADP), coming after similarly buoyant data released for January, the Fed seems to be setting […]
Continue readingJanuary beat for US non-farm payrolls – or did they?
Don’t you just love it? Every month the financial community analyses the eagerly awaited US non-farm payroll numbers and impresses us all with their reading of the state of the economy and the next potential move in interest rates and therefore life as we know it. Of course for particularly sophisticated algo funds all this […]
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