interest rates

I don’t believe the jobs report today is indicative of an improving US economy. I believe it is a one-off that is so strong that it will be difficult for the Fed to overlook it. And this makes the likelihood of rate hikes that much greater,…

According to Jon Hilsenrath at the Wall Street Journal, ECB and PBOC easing aren’t obstacles to a Fed rate hike before year-end. Yet, the Wall Street Journal is running a headline as its top story showing that "U.S. Companies Warn of…

With two recent Fed governors - Tarullo and Brainard - expressing a need for caution with normalizing Fed policy, I wanted to break down how I tend to think about monetary policy and its affect on resource allocation and private portfolio…

The first time I wrote about shale oil resource misallocation in the wake of lower oil prices was back in October 2014, exactly a year ago. A lot has happened in that year, so I want to look back at the oil-related posts I have written in…

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…

My base case is that the US stock market correction will not extend to major losses without a U.S.-based economic slowdown. Therefore, as potent as the Chinese devaluation crisis is as a signal for increasing global deflationary pressures,…

Yesterday I mentioned markers of economic and financial weakness that I believe show cracks in the facade of benign economic data out of the US and Europe. Today I want to briefly go through a few of these data points and highlight what…

As Q2 continued along, it became ever more evident that private forecasts above 3% annualized were overly optimistic and that the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast below 1% would get revised up. We met in the middle at 2.3%. What’s more is Q1…

Last week the Fed admitted to having mistakenly made public forecasts by staff economists which suggested that the Fed is indeed on a 2015 rate hike path. As a result, policy divergence is now set to widen, with the result being a bid for…

There are a lot of competing narratives going around as to why Greece is in such trouble relative to the rest of the eurozone. A lot of this centers on whether Greek fiscal profligacy or poor credit controls by foreign banks was the main…