inflation

New York Fed President William Dudley has reiterating Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s determination to push forward with interest rate hikes despite inflation below 2%. The Fed will continue to have this stance unless and until economic data…

The Bank of England kept its key policy rate unchanged at a record low 0.25% . Three dissents show how a weak currency and rising inflation are making it harder to keep rates low. The worst case scenario is an inflationary recession, which…

Yesterday’s release of the Personal Income and Outlays data showed personal income increasing 0.4% in January, ahead of expectations. The numbers demonstrate that the US economy continues to expand at a solid if unspectacular pace. The…

The equity markets that have fallen the least so far are the U.S. and the Japanese markets. If my prediction that we are looking into a more difficult period in the U.S. (and the euro zone), U.S. equities look particularly vulnerable, so…

A typical portfolio will almost certainly not deliver the required returns over the next decade. If ‘typical’ means a 60/40 approach, as already mentioned, then 2-4% annualised returns are what can realistically be expected. If ‘typical’…

The title of this post is what the Fed wants us to believe. It wants us to believe that it is prepared to raise interest rates this year but that it will increase them slowly by assessing the data, hiking once and re-assessing, and then…

Continuing where I left off last week, I am going to emphasize here that the Federal Reserve is likely to raise US interest rates unless the US economy slows materially. Meanwhile, the economic and market fundamentals are moving in the…

This is going to be a short thought piece. But the takeaway should be that the convergence to zero will continue unabated as the threat of inflation is muted given the combination of excess capacity, high private debt and unfavourable…

Deflationary pressures in China indicates that we probably need monetary tightening, not loosening. I know this sounds extremely counterintuitive, and so violates what we have learned about the world by assuming that the world looks a lot…

This fall, oil prices have tumbled so quickly that the effect on inflation, monetary policy and the economy is likely to be dramatic. As yet, however, we don’t know what those effects are likely to be, in part because the economics…