One of the most important things to understand about the upcoming US election is that both candidates seem to be leaning towards adopting some manner of protectionist policies. For Clinton, it seems to be an outgrowth of her protracted battle against Bernie Sanders whose message about lost jobs reso
On Thursday in “Stop The Madness,” we highlighted some commentary that we think is broadly representative of how investors are thinking about markets these days. In a nutshell, the message is this: there’s so much cash floating around and no one knows where to put it because yields on everything fro
We’ve talked tirelessly about how correlated and interconnected markets have become in the post crisis world. If you believe in the efficient market hypothesis, you believe - generally speaking - that asset prices always reflect available, relevant information. In other words, you can’t “beat the ma
So it was more mixed signals about the state of the global economy on Thursday with manufacturing reports out of the UK and the US painting starkly different pictures of economic health. At around 4:30 ET we got the UK print. Here’s the Bloomberg summary: U.K. Aug. Manufacturing PMI 53.3 vs 48.3 in
Sometimes really smart people say things that seem really silly in times when rationality has been pushed aside by some powerful force exerting undue pressure on markets. Allow us to give you an example. The following are excerpts from Friday’s commentary by Bloomberg’s Mark Cudmore, a former FX tra
“We’re in a world where they seem to work. They may be difficult to deal with for savers, they go along with quite decent equity prices.” That rather disquieting quote is from Fed Vice-Chair Stanley Fischer who was the Fed speaker du jour on Tuesday in yet another week where markets are simply waiti
Citi has some “things” they want you to take note of headed into the Friday jobs number that could ultimately determine “to hike or not to hike” next month. Here are the bullets (these are based on the initial print, i.e. not the revision): In these 19 years the August initial print has been above
On Saturday we noted that “buy the dip” has now ceased to be a condescending nod to retail investors and/or a critique of central bank largesse. Instead, Wall Street now openly advocates it. Here’s the quote from Deutsche Bank: “We suspect the Fed’s insistence to raise again will therefore allow bou
If you believe the Street, “buy the dip” has become scripture. We talked extensively this week about the Fed doing everything it can to preserve its optionality going forward. That was readily apparent on Friday when Yellen and vice Chair Fischer adopted seemingly contradictory lines. Optionality or
Alright, well we made it. It’s Friday. Yellen spoke and we survived. The rally lives. Another few red points on the Dow and S P and the Nasdaq’s marginally green. This was pretty easy to see coming. The optionality is critical. This is another one of those situations where you have to wonder what th
