Barring any more trade war flare-ups and Musk/Trump spats, the guiding light for equities is going to be inflation and rates over the next twelve calendar days. Here are the big events forthcoming:
All About Rates
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Bonds Bearing Down
The bond market has been in a bear market for sixty-three months. Sixty. Three. Months. We can’t get lower prices for sixty-three days (or six days, for that matter) in equities, but it is what it is.
With today’s dismal jobs report, bonds are slipping yet again, keeping alive the prospect that the latest pink pattern breaks down, sending interest rates ripping higher.
The Latest Interest Rates
Take a look at this Whitman’s Sampler of interest rate charts. They all seem to suggest that rates are about to head much lower.
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The Bigger Picture on US Treasuries
Part One: The Setup
On 10th November last year I wrote a post entitled Strange Days on US Treasuries. In that post I was looking at a very important inflection point that looked likely to be coming up on US Treasuries over the next few months to a year. I would suggest you read that post for the detailed analysis there of the outlook for US debt levels and interest payments as I’ll be looking at those in less detail this week.
This is currently a series of (likely) four posts reviewing the US Dollar, US Treasuries, and why the US Dollar may lose its status as the world’s main reserve currency. I published the first post in this series on the US Dollar on Monday last week and you can see that here.
After writing a lot of this review on bonds it has become clear that I can’t fit it into one post so I am dividing it into two. This post will look at historical bull and bear markets on bonds, the setup for a major increase in bond yields over coming months and years, and why that might play out rapidly rather than slowly.
(more…)Brave New World
I’ve been mulling over how to do this post for a while because I don’t want to offend readers who might be very sensitive to any criticism, direct or implied, of the Trump administration, and I tend to stay away from any political discussions. However, any objective review of the likely effect of some of that administration’s policies requires an honest discussion of those policies and their likely impact.
Given that I now believe that the odds of seeing a serious bear market this year are high and that a full market crash is increasingly on the cards. I need to do that objective review, and my apologies if anyone is offended. I am just describing the geopolitical and economic realities here as I see them and am not planning to make political commentary a regular feature in my analysis going forward.
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