Central Banks Manipulating Market Values
Jim Grant, Editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, discusses market manipulation by global central banks.
Video below.
You look great in Blue, but this pink dress
Guest post by Peter Tchir.
There was some chatter about the performance of fixed income ETF’s yesterday. They performed poorly at least relative to stocks and some had a late day sell-off fueling some speculation that credit wasn’t doing well.
That speculation was just wrong, but highlighted so,e problems with existing fixed income ETF’s.
They were trading at a premium and that premium tends to disappear when bonds become easy to source. While HY bonds remained well bid, the investment grade bond market is being flooded with new issues – primarily to enable large one time dividends. Might be worth probing into these companies a little deeper, but that is for another day.
So premium versus bond availability explains some of the noise, but to a large degree that is secondary.
Business confidence volatility is unhealthy for economic growth
Guest post by Sober Look.
The ISI Group combined four US regional Fed indices with Markit Manufacturing PMI to create a comprehensive US manufacturing index (chart below). A pattern of growth starts followed by fairly sharp corrections emerges. Some have speculated that this volatility, at least in part, can be explained by the Eurozone uncertainty flare-ups: Greece (2010), Italy (2011), Spain (2012). The pattern also exists in the economic surprise indices (see post-1 and post-2).
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