Goldilocks just keeps kicking the Phillips Curvers in the teeth

Last week the unemployment rate hit a cycle low of 3.8%, a level that was last seen in April 2000, at the very end of the Goldilocks era. Prior to that you would have to go all the way back to the “golden age” of the late 1960s in order to find rates this low....

“Bernie” di Maio and “Donald” Salvini vs. the Germans

I have only written a couple times on Europe over the last 18 months. Once in the lead-up to the Dutch election and again in the lead-up to the French election. The titles of those notes were “Trump, the great unifier of Europe” and “Trump, the great unifier of...

A Tough Day in the 4×4 Camp

Those folks in the 4 hikes in 2018/4 hikes in 2019 camp are probably not too happy after reading the May FOMC minutes. Here are a couple of excerpts that probably stung a little: “…  some participants noted it might soon be appropriate to revise the forward-guidance...

Demographics and Disinflation

“With all the crazy monetary experimentation over the last 10 years, how in the world did we not generate excessive amounts of inflation?  Surely negative short-term real rates for so long, with a 5x increase in the Fed balance sheet, should have taken us back to...

What are MOVE and HY telling us?

With just about four months of 2018 under our belts, spoos are down about 1.5% while 10-year Treasuries are up about 60bps in yield. If you had not been watching the daily price action since January, you might think the VIX would be sub-10 and the MOVE would be north...