Analysis Topic: Interest Rates and the Bond Market
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.Tuesday, March 22, 2016
U.S. Monetary Policy Kaleidoscopic Context / Interest-Rates / Money Supply
Dennis Lockhart, Atlanta Fed president, made a speech today trumping up the possibility rate hikes as soon as April.
In his speech, Lockhart cited "sufficient momentum evidenced by the economic data to justify a further step at one of the coming meetings, possibly as early as the meeting scheduled for end of April."
Let's dive into his speech and also put a spotlight on his claim of "sufficient momentum."
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Sunday, March 20, 2016
Fed Clown Show Has Come and Gone / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
The opening segment from this week’s edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole has a little fun with the post-FOMC market situation. Unfortunately, there is all too much reality in this clowning around. From NFTRH 387:
Our main theme has been that the ironclad post-2011 confidence in the Federal Reserve among conventional market participants would slowly but surely start to fade because macro parlor tricks, so vigorously employed by the Bernanke Fed, were only tricks or in some cases (Operation Twist) borderline magic, after all.
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Saturday, March 19, 2016
BoJ and ECB Bond Buying - Well That Didn’t Work / Interest-Rates / Financial Crisis 2016
The Bank of Japan and European Central Bank eased recently, which is to say they stepped up their bond buying and/or pushed interest rates further into negative territory. These kinds of things are proxies for currency devaluation in the sense that money printing and lower interest rates generally cause the offending country’s currency to be seen as less valuable by traders and savers, sending its exchange rate down versus those of its trading partners.
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Friday, March 18, 2016
Junk Bonds... Here we go again! / Interest-Rates / Corporate Bonds
MUT is making all-time new highs as this rally sucks in more gullible investors into junk bonds. As I have said before, MUT is the “cream of the crop.” Investors in this index have fared better than in most junk bond funds.
The sad part about this is that MUT is on a similar Cycle pattern as SPX. In other words, it may be about to join SPX in a panic Cycle decline next week.
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Friday, March 18, 2016
Is This The Debt Jubilee? / Interest-Rates / Global Debt Crisis 2016
Not so long ago the financial world viewed certain numbers as limits beyond which lay trouble. Interest rates near zero, for instance, were thought to risk destabilizing the banking system. And government fiscal deficits above 3% were considered so dangerous that exceeding this level was prohibited by the Maastricht treaty that all euorzone members were required to sign.
Those numbers -- 0% and 3% -- are still considered bad. But now for the opposite reason: They're insufficiently aggressive.
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Wednesday, March 16, 2016
FOMC Statement - Backing Off On the Rate Increases, Lowering Forecasts / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
The Fed recognized that growth is slow, and that inflation remains subdued.
I include a chart of the real median household income to demonstrate why the recovery is so wobbly. Demand and investment are weak because people have less money to spend. Wow, what a surprise.
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Runaway Credit is the Biggest Threat to Life as We Know It - Video / Interest-Rates / Credit Crisis 2016
Transcript excerpt: Tuesday March 15 2016 today I'm gonna be talking about runaway credit
and how life as we know is under threat from runaway credit debt I don't wanna
sound alarmist but I think I need to cover this subject
I'll start out with a comment John Pierpont Morgan JP Morgan back in 1912 the poo poo joe meat committee
hearing at the EUS House of Representatives here he was asked what
gold was and he said money is gold and nothing else they they don't have a
variations that this and some people say that he said money is golden everything
else is credit but I think he was that's a misquote patient but it still serves
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The Next Level of Monetary Policy / Interest-Rates / Central Banks
There’s an old adage in economics that the best way to cure deflation is to drop money from helicopters. Clearly this phrase isn’t older than mid-20th century, because before that time we didn’t have helicopters… we also didn’t have manipulative central banks. But now we have both, and they are about to join forces.The helicopter statement isn’t meant literally. It conveys how central banks approach an economy when mainstream – and even out of the mainstream – monetary policies have failed.
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Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The World’s Worst Central Bank - Banco Central de Venezuela / Interest-Rates / Central Banks
The Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) wins the prize as the world’s worst central bank – at least for the time being. Venezuela’s annual inflation has been in triple-digit territory for more than three years. As the accompanying chart shows, the implied annual inflation rate soared as high as 800% last summer. Since then, inflation has fallen to its current 320% annual rate. This is still well above the phony 180.9% annual rate reported by the BCV in December.
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Monday, March 14, 2016
Bail-Ins And Negative Interest Rates, The Ultimate Admission Of Failure.... / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
Mike Hoy writes: ... Cash and Physical Gold, Standing in The Way of a Lifetime of Financial Servitude and Slavery!
For the last several decades, the out-of-control growth of US Government spending when combined with the unlimited printing policies of "The Fed" has set the stage for "The Perfect Storm!"
Anyone with a simple calculator can easily understand how it is virtually impossible for 320,000,000 people to retire a current and rapidly growing debt of $19,000,000,000,000. This is a sum which equates into $60,000 worth of debt per man, woman and child in the US today. Please ignore the fact that half of the population pays no income tax at all. Forget about the $100,000,000,000,000-$200,000,000,000,000 in future entitlement obligations as only a dreamer could believe this debt has any chance of ever being funded with anything other than more worthless paper!!
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Sunday, March 13, 2016
Money Velocity Proves Q.E. Failure / Interest-Rates / Money Supply
The current monetary policy is stuck in place. It is highly destructive to banking systems, working capital, and financial markets. Yet it continues ad infinitum, actually until the great collapse. A systemic Lehman event is in progress, as the global financial structure is collapsing. The only remedy is the Gold Standard installation, which is happening, but its architects are from the East. They are labeled as enemies, when the root problem is in the Western banking hive.
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Friday, March 11, 2016
Negative Rates and Money Heaven Financial Wonderland Q&A / Interest-Rates / Negative Interest Rates
Questions on negative rates keep coming in: Where does the money go? Who benefits? Will the Fed do the same? What's Draghi up to?
A quick refresher course on paying interest on excess reserves vs. charging interest on excess reserves is in order.
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Friday, March 11, 2016
Mario Draghi Got Lost In A Rabbit Hole / Interest-Rates / ECB Interest Rates
I’ll try and keep this gracefully short: Mario Draghi ‘unleashed’ a bazooka full of desperate tools on the financial markets yesterday and they blew up in his face faster than you could say blowback or backdraft (and that’s just the start of the alphabet). This must and will mean that Draghi’s stint as ECB head is for all intents and purposes done. But…
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Friday, March 11, 2016
ECB Panic Money Printing to Save Euro-zone from Economic Collapse as BrExit Looms / Interest-Rates / Negative Interest Rates
A little over a month on from the Bank of Japan's panic announcement of negative interest rates and money printing. Now it's the turn of the ECB to PANIC by firing it's own inflation bazooka in what is commonly termed as the currency wars (competitive devaluations) as nations attempt to import inflation and export deflation by means of manipulating exchange rates. This weeks ECB PANIC followed euro-zone inflation turning negative again (CPI -0.2%) and with virtually the whole of southern europe in a permanent economic depression, with debt mountains continuing to balloon in a perpetual state of imminent bankruptcy of the whole of southern europe as ALL central banks ONLY really have ONE objective which is to INFLATE debt mountains away for which they CREATE INFLATION by means of MONEY PRINTING and so without inflation the debt cannot be serviced.
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Tuesday, March 08, 2016
U.S. Treasury Shorts Pounded into the Ground / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
This has got to be a decline for the records. There is nothing else like it in this chart. The treasury shorts are getting nailed.
ZeroHedge reports, “Over the past week we have been following a disturbing development in the US Treasury market: while the repo rate on the 10Y has been sliding deep into negative territory for a while, on Friday it finally hit the "fails charge" of -3.00%, suggesting there is a massive shortage of Treasury paper as a result of wholesale shorting by various market participants.
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Saturday, March 05, 2016
More and More Fed Officials Calling For NIRP / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
The Fed Vice-Chair has begun laying the groundwork for NIRP.
The US Federal Reserve is obsessed with market reactions to its policies. Because of this, anytime the Fed plans to announce a major change in policy, it preps the markets via numerous leaks and hints… oftentimes for months in advance.
An excellent example of this concerns the Fed’s decision to taper QE back in 2013.
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Saturday, March 05, 2016
Financial Repression - Margin Rules Changes Force New Private Funding of Public Debt / Interest-Rates / US Debt
FRA Co-Founder Gordon T. Long and Dan Amerman have an in-depth conversation covering various topics such as Financial Repression, Quantitative Easing, devious actions of the Fed and much more.
Read full article... Read full article...Daniel R. Amerman is a Chartered Financial Analyst, author, and speaker, with BSBA and MBA degrees in Finance, and over 30 years of professional financial experience. As an investment banking vice president in the 1980s he did groundbreaking work in the security originations and asset/liability management areas, including CMO/REMIC originations as part of portfolio restructurings for financial institutions, as well as the creation of synthetic securities for institutional clients. As an independent quantitative analyst in the 1990s and 2000s, he structured mortgage-backed bond financing and provided analytical services for real estate acquisitions by multifamily and commercial real estate owners, investment banks, and tax-exempt issuers.
Friday, March 04, 2016
Short Squeeze in Treasuries? / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
Day 43 came and went with a small throw-over of the trendline at the close. This final thrust made 21 waves (an impulse) from 1931.88 to today’s close, so I don’t see how they can add any more waves to it.
The normal amount of time in a counter-trend rally is 21 days in a bear market, and often much shorter. Today is day 21 from the February 11 low, so it appears to have fulfilled the time requirement. One of my Swing Models suggested February 26 would give us the turn, but it is now 6 calendar days overdue. Since tomorrow is 4.3 market days from my projected “swing high,” I had originally suggested that tomorrow would be the first low of the decline. I will eat crow over that call.
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Thursday, March 03, 2016
Fed Stuck Between Hard Place and a Grenade / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away. Raymond HullThe Fed is stuck in between a hard place and a grenade, given this option, they will choose the hard place as unless you are looking for a one-way to ticket to nowhere you won’t choose the grenade. The Fed has nowhere to go; there is only one option available inflate the money supply or die trying to.
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Thursday, March 03, 2016
How Does Sam Afford to Buy So Much Stuff? / Interest-Rates / US Debt
Mark Brandly writes: Lately, I’ve wondered how my neighbor, Sam, affords to buy so much stuff. He appears to have an unlimited budget. When I asked him about this, Sam asked, “Do you think I’m spending too much?”
“That depends,” I said, “How much money do you make?”
“I take home $100,000 a year.”
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