United States

This chart speaks volumes about the Trump rally.

The GDP report today showed middling growth of an annualized 1.9% in the US in the last quarter of 2016. That’s not gangbusters, but it’s not bad either. The thing to look at is consumption, because that shows the consumer chugging along.…

US GDP numbers released today show the economy grew at a 1.9% annualized pace in the last quarter. That follows a 3.5% pace in the quarter before. Not bad. But the question now is how long this will keep up. Declining auto sales might offer…

Tonight US President Donald Trump is due to give his first state of the union address. From a foreign policy perspective, the big item on the table is Russia. But from an economic perspective, the country we meed to be thinking about is…

Imagine you could issue 30- or 50-year paper today at 3 or 4%. And you have a strong suspicion that - in the future - 2-year paper won’t be 1.15% like it is today. You think it could be 4, 5 or 6%. Why not lock in the long-term rates of…

The problem with the Trump administration’s talk about lengthening the maturity of debt issuance is that it confuses the future path of interest rates with the steepness of the yield curve. They talk about locking in low rates. And what…

Forget about the executive orders and Trump press conferences. This is all for show - reality TV, if you will. Concentrate instead on what actually happens, what policies are actually implemented and what impact this is going to have on the…

This is going to be a quick hit post to get some thoughts down on paper because a few threads are coalescing for me that I want to give some coherence to. The essence of the threads revolves around the tension at the Fed between normalizing…

One of the lead stories at Bloomberg this morning is an article about foreigners shying away from “financing the US government”. And the conclusion of this article is that it could mean higher interest rates in the US. Is this conclusion…

Early on in President Trump’s new administration, too much of his energy is being placed on divisive ‘cultural’ issues and not enough attention is being paid to economic policies. To the degree Trump has turned to the economy, much of his…