David Stockman’s Contra Corner

This is getting truly ridiculous. They made another run at another all time high on the S&P 500 today, notwithstanding that the Fed’s self-inflicted inflationary trap is closing in all around it. So when the virulent incoming data soon forces them to start tapering ahead of schedule and beginning the “lift-off” of interest rates long […]

Glowing Orange: Repo Market Collateral Rumble Early-morning action in the repo market shows a musical chairs-like collateral scramble; it has the Fed's attention. But the Fed is blasé about it (i.e. 'too much cash'). Yet these collateral scrambles resemble what we saw in March 2020. Jeff Snider, Head of Global Investment Research for Alhambra Investments and Emil Kalinowski. Topics & Time Codes 01:41 Montana Senator Daines asked a Jeff-Snider-question to Jerome Powell in...

The crazy, convoluted, mixed up messaging from the CDC – it’s been this way from the beginning of the pandemic until now – has taken yet another turn. Now the CDC is recommending masks not just for the unvaccinated but for the vaccinated too. https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/07/28/the_cdcs_hysterical_delta_flip-flop_might_be_its_final_undoing_787443.html

You don’t need a PhD in economics or a a fancy DSGE model (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) to know that something about the American economy changed drastically after the mid-1990s. You can actually see it with your naked eye in the chart below. The short story is that once the Fed-fueled tech boom of the […]

Keynesian economists in the US have done their best to obfuscate the Fed’s culpability for the burned out industrial zone dotting Flyover American from coast to coast. Along with their nonchalance about China’s mountainous internal debt (about $50 trillion counting financial debt), a much used canard is the claim that China’s ultra-dirty float mainly reflected […]

June retail sales allegedly rose at a booming 15.6% year-over-year rate, thereby reminding us once again that just because you can look it up on Bloomberg doesn’t make it true. Actually, inflation-adjusted retail sales have fallen at a 13.5% annual rate since the March peak. Then again, the March peak was an out-of-this-world aberration that […]

The re-channeling of the Fed’s inflationary money-pumping from main street to Wall Street gave rise to Twin Big Lies. Namely, that the Friedman formula about too much money chasing too few goods was obsolete, and that the soaring paper wealth being generated in asset markets was real, sustainable and a sign of resurgent capitalist prosperity. […]

FRONTLINE, the American news magazine, is critiquing the Federal Reserve for showering big banks, big business and Wall Street with easy money. Money that has neither reached the real economy nor the vast majority of Americans. Yes to the latter, no no no no no to the former. ----SEE EPISODE 92----- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_AIP Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilKalinowski Alhambra YouTube: https://bit.ly/2Xp3roy Emil YouTube: https://bit.ly/310yisL Art:...

Early-morning action in the repo market shows a musical chairs-like collateral scramble; it has the Fed's attention. But the Fed is blasé about it (i.e. 'too much cash'). Yet these collateral scrambles resemble what we saw in March 2020, when the swaps hit the fan. ----SEE EPISODE 91---- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_AIP Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilKalinowski Alhambra YouTube: https://bit.ly/2Xp3roy Emil YouTube: https://bit.ly/310yisL Art: https://davidparkins.com/...