The big news of the week was President Trump delaying tariff implementation for 90 days, a possibility I outlined for DKI subscribers the previous Sunday. Tariffs remain in place for China which responded with public insults and by increasing their own tariffs. They threatened to watch fewer Hollywood films, something I expect is of zero … Read more
The big news of the week was President Trump announcing tariffs in excess of what the market expected. Equity indexes immediately fell and continued that trend for the following two days. While most of the commentary was negative, I’m not convinced the approved consensus is correct. The short version is in this edition of the … Read more
We saw a weak and overstated GDP print combined with a higher inflation metric. The conclusion is that absent government spending, we’re heading for stagflation. One problem: government spending is destroying value. Mish Shedlock warns that we can’t vote our way out of the problem. On the commercial real estate front, landlords are coming up … Read more
This wasn’t a good week for the “pivot” people and asset gatherers who have been begging the Federal Reserve for lower rates. We got a higher-than-expected CPI and PPI. Making things worse, the short-term monthly numbers have started to accelerate meaning the disinflation story might be dead for now. Retail sales and manufacturing numbers were … Read more
Introduction: We’ve noted in the past that many market participants are eagerly waiting for the “Fed pivot”; the time when they expect the Federal Reserve will reassure investors that it’s done raising rates and can get back to more of the fun zero-interest rate combined with trillions of dollars of quantitative easing. Of course that … Read more
As “expected” the Federal Reserve raised the fed funds rate by another 75 basis points (.75%) today. We put “expected” in quotation marks because when we started writing about inflation ten months ago, the big Wall Street firms thought we’d get a total of 75 basis points of rate hikes for all of 2022. We … Read more
