WSJ Economists’ Forecasts For 10-Year Yields And The Fed Funds Rate – May 18, 2015
The Fed minutes of its March 17-18 policy meeting released last week was were generally viewed by the popular financial press as showing a split in the FOMC on the timing of a rate hike. The Wall Street Journal has now made available its April survey of economists on key economic indicators. At this point only 19 percent […]
The San Francisco Fed Just Gave A Green Light For A June Rate Hike
Back on March 3, it was none other than a Federal Reserve bank, that of Atlanta, which as we first reported shocked the world or at least those permabullish, consensus-chasing, Wall Street weathermen-cum- economists who assume that a world with $200 trillion in debt will grow at the same CAGR as a world without 4 times […]
Interest Rates Spiking Everywhere
Just as negative interest rates start to seem normal, the markets decide otherwise. US 10-year Treasury bonds, for instance, yielded about 1.9% in April and are now above 2.20%. As CNBC presents it: And the trend reversal isn’t limited to the US. Across Europe and Asia rates have spiked in the past month. From Bloomberg: What does […]
Bull Of The Day: Trinseo S.A.
Trinseo S.A. (TSE – Snapshot Report) reorganized their business into two new divisions as of January 1, 2015, and were quickly rewarded with strong earnings numbers in the first quarter of implementation. This reorg consisted of creating the Performance Materials segment, and the Basic Plastics & Feedstocks segment; which saw improved profitability, and accelerated growth for the company […]
How Inflation Affects Your Future
“The arithmetic makes it plain that inflation is a far more devastating tax than anything that has been enacted by our legislature. The inflation tax has a fantastic ability to simply consume capital. It makes no difference to a widow with her savings in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income […]
Home Builders Optimistic Despite Decline In Traffic; Housing Market Index Declines
The National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Market Index once again reveals positive builder sentiment even though new home sales are weak. The HMI is Derived from a monthly survey that NAHB has been conducting for 30 years. The index gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months as “good,” “fair” […]
Cautious Optimism
Last week I pointed out several signs from the Twitter stream that indicated the market should break higher. Most of those signs are still in place, but the current optimism is a bit tempered. On Friday the daily print for Twitter momentum (or sentiment) for the S&P 500 Index (SPX) was a very strong +31. This […]
EC Recession Check: Updating The Indicators
In December of 2007, I wrote in my weekly newsletter that we were “…either in, or about to be in, the worst recession since the ‘Great Depression.'” At that time, the warning rang hollow as GDP growth was positive, and the markets were still marching higher as the calendar turned to 2008. It was a year […]
NAHB Housing Market Index: Confidence Falls Two Points In May
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Housing Market Index (HMI) is a gauge of builder opinion on the relative level of current and future single-family home sales. It is a diffusion index, which means that a reading above 50 indicates a favorable outlook on home sales; below 50 indicates a negative outlook. The latest […]
