Tag Archive: Taxes

FX Daily, June 09: Without Yield Support, the Dollar Wilts

Falling US yields weigh on the US dollar. The 10-year Treasury yield is flirting with the 1.50% mark, and the greenback is trading heavily against all the major and most emerging market currencies. European and the Asia Pacific benchmark yields are lower as well.

Read More »

FX Daily, June 07: The Greenback Steadies after Retreating on the Jobs Data

After falling to 1.55% after the US employment data, which, while mixing expectations, could hardly be considered weak, the US 10-year yield has come back firmer today (1.58%) This may be lending the greenback a better tone. Equity markets are quiet. Most markets in the Asia Pacific region edged higher.

Read More »

FX Daily, April 8: Calm Capital Markets See the Dollar Drift

Overview:  Global stocks are moving higher today.  Fears of a new lockdown in Tokyo amid rising covid cases weighed on Japanese stocks, a notable exception as the MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose for its fifth session of the past six.  Europe's Dow Jones Stoxx 600 is edging to new record highs today and is advancing for its fifth session of the past seven. 

Read More »

Politics Get Weird, Markets Don’t Care

A mob, led by a shirtless man wearing a Viking helmet, stormed the Capitol building a couple of weeks ago and five people died before order was restored. A man from upstate New York sat in a Senator’s office and smoked a joint. Another roamed the halls of Congress with a Confederate flag.

Read More »

*These* Are The Real Huge Jobs Numbers, And They Will Make Your Blood Run Cold

There is simply no way to spin these figures as anything good. Not just the usual ones were talking about here, but more so some new data that you probably haven’t seen before. Beginning with the regular, it doesn’t matter that the level of initial jobless claims has declined substantially over the past few weeks

Read More »

Tax Cuts And (Less) Spending

After being rumored and talked about for over a year, at the end of last year the tax cuts were finally delivered. The idea had captured much market attention during that often anxious period of political flirtation. Prices would rise or fall by turn based on whether or not it seemed a realistic possibility.

Read More »

Now Capex?

Of all the high frequency data the Personal Savings Rate is probably the least reliable. It is subject to both regular and benchmark revisions that can change the estimates drastically one way or the other. One step up from that statistic is the figures for Construction Spending. The initial monthly estimates don’t survive very long, and lately they have been quite weak in the first run only to be revised sharply higher over subsequent months.

Read More »

FX Daily, April 27: Several Developments ahead of the ECB meeting

The ECB meeting and the press conference that follows it is the main event. However, it has had to compete with the Bank of Japan and Riksbank meetings, as well as the further reflection of the tax reform proposals by the Trump Administration yesterday.

Read More »

FX Daily, April 26: Dollar Stabilizes Ahead of Trump and ECB

The US dollar was marked down in response to the French election and saw some follow through selling yesterday, but the momentum had slowed, and now it is stalled. The greenback is posting upticks against nearly all the major currencies. There is a good reason to be cautious.

Read More »

Lies, Damn Lies, and Taxes

President Trump hinted at the end of last week that the Administration's tax proposals would be aired in the next two or three weeks. This seems to be a signal of its inclusion in his address to both houses of Congress on February 28. This is not quite a State of the Union speech, but similar and precisely what Obama did in February 2009.

Read More »

The Better Way: Backing into Smoot-Hawley and Repeating the Flaws of PPP

Part of the US Republican tax reforms call for a border adjustment. It will tax imports fully and not exports. This will likely be challenged at the WTO. Many economists say the dollar will automatically appreciate by 20%. WE are bullish the dollar but skeptical of the logic here.

Read More »

The Road to Fascism in Just Two Charts

Laws of politics have been turned upside down. The Intellectuals Yet Idiots can make no sense of it. The underdog who ‘tell it how it is’ appeal to people while established reasoning does not.

Read More »

Labour Productivity, Taxes and Okun’s Law

The great “science” of economics once discovered an empirical relationship between GDP and unemployment that has been dubbed Okun’s Law. It simply states that the unemployment rate rises as GDP contracts, or vice versa, as production shrinks less peo...

Read More »