Federal Reserve

Understanding curve flattening Long-time readers know that I have talked for a number of years about a longer-term global convergence to zero play that I see shaping up. It first emerged during the mid-cycle slowdown in 2015 and 2016 as…

Real quick here on Europe as I promised yesterday to add some thoughts on Germany after my trip to Cologne US base rates are too high Take a look at this chart from Bianco Research. Jim Bianco describes this as showing the US having the…

I am going to argue here that monetary policy is both less effective than fiscal policy, and that over-reliance on it unnecessarily politicizes monetary policy by putting unelected officials in too prominent an economic role. I would argue…

Sorry for the alarmist post title. But the Fed has completely bottled it. I've been warning for some time that it could go this way. And now, we are in in the endgame. First, the Fed overtightened through 2018. Then, forced at gunpoint by…

The US is the cleanest shirt Last week, I was talking to Megan Greene, the former chief economist at John Hancock for an interview on the US and European economies. And she said something that resonated with me about the global growth…

The big story today is the potential for a currency war, emanating from the escalating trade war between the US and China. But there's a considerable degree of data flow that I want to parse to give a more complete macro view. Having…

My macro view What's my overall thesis at this juncture? It's that the global economy is slowing and is likely to slow further before it picks up. The US is the laggard in this slowing but is affected as well. From a markets perspective,…

This is a follow-up to my subscriber post from earlier today on the US economy. For those of you who are not paying subscribers, let me summarize the post by saying I think the US economy is slowing but not in a recession. Nevertheless, I…

Today, we saw a nice pop in equities on the back of a dovish Fed and falling interest rates. Equities moved to new highs as a result. But, clearly, falling yields are a sign of economic distress that one might think would cause equity…

The latest jobs report out of the US was relatively poor. While the comprehensive U-6 unemployment rate went down to the lowest since 2000, other data points suggested the labor market is topping. And with bond markets already predicting a…