Most markets are closed today.
For some reason, the US takes Good Friday off and not Monday, which is better, because then you get to come back to a short week, which feels like another vacation. Anyway, this is going to be a wild week as we have 5 scheduled Fed speakers and the Fed Minutes on Wednesday.
Not too much happened over the weekend, other than Microsoft unleashing an Artificially Intelligent ChatBot on Twitter that quickly turned into a racist Trump supporter before having its plug pulled after just 15 hours of freedom. The other big news of the weekend was Bernie Sanders crushing Hillary in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, taking over 70% of the vote in each state. Meanwhile, the GOP candidates continued to slander each others’ wives.
Don’t forget, we’re heading into the end of the month/quarter, so we’re expecting great efforts to be made propping up the markets into our Q1 earnings reports in April. It’s a pretty busy data week and, this morning, we got a good report on Chinese Industrial Profits which, unfortunately, makes no sense given the other data we’ve seen but, as I said, all the stops will be pulled out this week to give us a positive quarter to start the year.
In addition to what you can see on the calendar, Charlie Evans speaks on Thursday afternoon but Lacker has the last word on Friday and he’s all about raising the rates , so we’ll be sticking with our hedges regardless this week. On the whole, we are not expecting great things from earnings and the Central Banksters have Already played the stimulus card to save March – what’s left to save April? Perhaps the Fed Minutes will offer a clue.
California moved to make the minimum wage $15 over the weekend and that is fantastic news for workers – in 2022, when they finally take effect. Well, if workers are lucky, we will have deflation over the next 6 years and it will seem like real money. That deflation is far more likely if we continue to delay paying our workers living wages.
