Free Republic

As soon as Bidenflation started soaring with his war on fossil fuels and manic Federal spending, we saw The Federal Reserve starting to remove the excessive monetary stimulus, but Congress didn’t cancel its spending spree. We ADP jobs report yesterday was ugly (+127k jobs added after +239k jobs added in October). Now we have the Challenger, Gray and Christmas jobs report for Novemeber … and it is terrible. An increase of 416.5% in job cuts. Today, the US Personal Consumption Expenditures data was released. It shows that the CORE PCE YoY fell to a still high 5%. If The Fed...

Federal Reserve officials Monday continued to push for higher for longer interest to bring down inflation that is running hotter than previously anticipated. John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said Monday he expected inflation to moderate, but flagged drivers of underlying inflation, particularly in a red-hot labor market with “rapid” wage growth, as the most challenging. The New York Fed chief forecast core PCE, the Fed's preferred inflation measure, to slow from its current level of 5.1% to between 3% and 3.5% next year, driven by slowing global growth and fewer supply chain disruption. That,...

Fed Rollercoaster! Deutsche Bank, my former employer, said that The Fed will slash rates by 200 basis points by mid-2024 after staying hawkish in the short term. Deutsche Bank increased its view on the terminal rate and now sees it hitting 5.1% in May. The Federal Reserve will remain hawkish in the short term but will cut benchmark rates sharply after that, according to a Monday note from Deutsche Bank. The central bank has hiked rates by 375 basis points so far this year, with another half-point increase widely expected next month. Even more tightening will come, with analysts at...

Once the government can control all money in America with the push of a button, anything approaching liberty is dead on arrival. When I first saw the acronym “CBDC,” I may have betrayed my California roots when I thought it was some new cannabis product that will join all the other CBD products sold everywhere, including at truck stops. I’m not so naïve now, and I know that CBDC, which stands for Central Bank Digital Currency, is possibly the most dangerous idea ever bandied about in American politics. The plan is that the federal government would end paper and coin...

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that it would be teaming up with global financial giants to launch a 12-week digital dollar pilot program. The New York Fed’s experiment will review how banks are able to process digital dollar tokens within the central bank system and quantify their impact, with the assistance of the some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Mastercard, and Wells Fargo & Co. were among the major banks said to be participating in the trial, which was led by the Fed’s New York Innovation Center (NYIC), according to a...

Way to go, Joe! Interesting story on Alignable. Due to high inflation, reduced consumer spending, higher rents and other economic pressures, U.S.-based small business owners’ rent problems just escalated to new heights nationally this month, based on Alignable’s November Rent Poll of 6,326 small business owners taken from 11/19/22 to 11/22/22. Unfortunately, 41% of U.S.-based small business owners report that they could not pay their rent in full and on time in November, a new record for 2022. Making matters worse, this occurred during a quarter when more money should be coming in and rent delinquency rates should be decreasing....

Despite The Federal Reserve removing some of the monetary punch bowl, Bankrate’s 30-year mortgage rate declined to 6.77% yesterday. Catch a rising yield and put it your pocket. European sovereign yield are up over 10 basis points today. On this side of the pond, The Federal Reserve has begun their experiment with big banks using digital currency. This is a step towards going to a cashless economy. Why is this terrifying? Blockchain technology is a fantastic innovation for processing payments given its ledger capabiliities. But that means that The Federal Reserve might be able to look at your complete history...

What interest rates are telling us is a bad sign. With an impending railroad strike that can torpedo the US economy (but if that is possible, why is the Biden Clan vacationing in Nantucket for Thanksgiving weekend when Joe should be talking with railroads and the unions to not let this happen?), let’s see what interest rates are telling us. First, the US Treasury 10Y-2Y yield curve continues to descrend into the abyss (now at -80 basis points). Second, the latest Fed Dot Plot (from September, new one will be issued during December) show that The Fed thinks that their...

Alarm! Yesterday’s PUT/CALL ratio was the highest in history at 1.46. That is higher than 2001 and 2008. REAL M2 Money YoY has crashed to its lowest level since 1980 and Jimmy Carter. And the train keeps on rollin’. Instead of Little Games, The Federal Reserve is making this BIG GAMES.

US consumers are feeling that inflation is hot, hot, hot! There is another Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on December 14th and everyone is interested in what The Fed will do. Or how much will The Fed raises rates? Recent inflation numbers are still terrible (for the US, that is). But slowing, giving Fed officials reason to slow down the pace of rate increases. But now the Cleveland Fed has introduced a new inflation measure: Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectation index. And unfortunately it shows that consumers expectations for inflation is actually rising rapidly over the past two weeks to...

As I mentioned on Varney and Company on Fox Business, housing is going to suffer when The Fed starts to tighten their monetary policy. And here we are, folks! US existing home sales fell a staggering -28.43% YoY in October as M2 Money growth grinds to almost a halt. The median price of existing home sales slowed to 6.6% YoY. Inventory of EHS remains below pre-Covid levels. Unrelated to housing, Prince Imhotep (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari) said Friday that the whole idea of cryptocurrency is “nonsense” after the implosion of FTX revealed the industry’s shortcomings. “This...

How low will the US Treasury 10y-2y yield curve go? As of today, the US Treasury 10yr-2yr yield curve is the most inverted since 1981 at -70 basis points. I am disappointed that The New York Times cancelled their $2,400 event to listen to Sam The Sham Bankman-Fried, Vlad “Show my your money!” Zelensky, Larry “The Big Fink” Fink and Janet “We never saw it coming” Yellen. I would have loved to do the New York Times job for them and ask hard questions to Sam The Sham and Zelensky about money laundering.

Call out The Birds Of War! Aka, The Federal Reserve. The Philadelphia Fed’s Business Outlook plunged to -19.40% YoY, the worst since 2012. Notice how the Philly Phed Plunge is related to M2 Money growth YoY. Birds of war!

Employers should stop giving pay rises to their staff, a member of the Federal Reserve's board has said, in a bid to help bring down inflation. Christopher Waller, one of six members of the Fed's board, used a speech in Phoenix, Arizona to urge bosses to take into account inflation when looking at their labor force. He pointed out that there are now almost two jobs for every person looking for work, and that wages were rising faster than they have in decades - making the target of 2 percent inflation even tougher to reach.

US mortgage rates fell last week by the most since the end of July, slipping below 7% and helping generate a bounce in purchase applications that otherwise remain depressed, but only in the Seasonally Adjusted data. The NON-Seasonally Adjusted data show a hefty decline. The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage decreased 24 basis points to 6.9% in the week ended Nov. 11, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data released Wednesday. The group’s index of applications to buy a home rose 4.4% — the most since June — but is still near the weakest level since 2015. But the...

(Reuters) -Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic said on Tuesday he sees little evidence that the U.S. central bank's aggressive monetary policy tightening is slowing inflation, and borrowing costs will have to rise further for that to happen. "Tighter money has not yet constrained business activity enough to seriously dent inflation," Bostic said in an essay posted on the Atlanta Fed's website. "I anticipate that more rate hikes will be needed" to get policy sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to the Fed's 2% target, he said. Bostic did not indicate if he favored slowing the pace of future rate increases,...

The October Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices came out yesterday and its a doozy. The Net Percentage of Domestic Banks Reporting Stronger Demand for Mortgage Loans is sinking faster than Joe Biden’s oratory skills as The Fed tightens their monetary belts. Jumbo mortgages, those that are greater than FHFA’s conforming loan limit, are tanking as well. And today, the University of Michigan (BOOO!!) consumer survey for housing buying conditions fell to the lowest level in recorded history. Given the latest inflation numbers (improving from disastrous, 8.2% YoY to really horrible, 7.70% YoY), and unemployment rate rising...

Media coverage of inflationary effects primarily focuses on the impact of rising price levels upon consumers and producers, but there are clearly effects beyond those. As monetary authorities initiate policies intending to stem the upward trend of prices, financial markets may become more volatile than normal. Should inflation prove stubborn, or particularly unpredictable and thus difficult for contractionary monetary policy to counteract, financial markets may become excessively volatile. High levels of volatility dissuade investment, and at very high levels, careening markets may pose a threat to financial stability. In either case, the prices that guide economic calculation become less reliable....

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of President Obama and a Democrat Congressional sweep, the US has embraced Modern Monetary Theory (MMT or borrow, print and spend without consequence). And between the financial crisis and the Covid crisis of 2008, we have seen an increase in US public debt from $10.7 trillion in Q4 2008 to a staggering $30.6 trillion as of Q2 2022. That is a staggering increase of 186% in only 14 years. How about US Money stock? M2 Money stock has grown by 162.5% since the beginning of 2009 and the “Blue Wave”...

MARKET EXTRA The Federal Reserve on Friday confirmed what many investors were saying for some time: the $24 trillion Treasury market has been experiencing low levels of market liquidity in recent months. The central bank has been rapidly increasing interest rates since March as part of a fight to bring inflation down from a 40-year high. The hope has been that such steps can cool consumer demand enough to tame prices, without throwing the economy into a painful recession, or spark a financial crisis. But since May, cracks in liquidity in Treasurys, the biggest, deepest part of the U.S. bond...