Market Overview

After 100bp of rate cuts, Fed Chair Powell suggests policy remains restrictive – even if inflation remains elevated they will merely “maintain” policy restraint for longer. This indicates an...

More trade war tariffs have been collected under Biden than Trump, but US tariffs remain among the lowest in the developed world. Meanwhile, gold prices hit new highs. Each week, the Syz investment...

Stocks opened higher yesterday and traded mostly sideways to higher for the rest of the day. Just an uneventful day. The reason, I think, was just due to implied volatility resetting after the VIX...

Markets, as we all know, don’t like uncertainty. And right now, there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade policy. While the Trump administration’s tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been...

The major stock market indexes are still up since Election Day despite recent turbulence caused by DeepSeek and Trump Tariffs 2.0 (chart). The former is weighing on the shares of AI companies....

Geopolitics I: What Trump Wants from Canada & Mexico. It’s become abundantly clear to us what President Donald Trump wants from Mexico. To Trump, Mexico is a looming security threat. In his view,...

This will be a hectic week. Earnings season is winding down, of course, but we have lots of economic data, starting on Wednesday with the core CPI, which is expected to rise by 0.3% m/m from 0.2%....

All money is lent into existence. The Federal Reserve or the government does not print money. Those two facts are vital to understanding our lead question: where does money come from? Furthermore,...

The NY Fed has recently published a study on bank failures in the U.S., examining the reasons why banks fail. For this study, the regulator constructed a large database with balance sheet information...

Yesterday’s market was a bit volatile, though not surprising. We mainly saw sideways trading for most of the day until about 2 PM, when we experienced a significant downdraft. However, that was...

The Fed is cautious, and so is the Bank of Japan. The ECB seems determined to keep cutting and the Bank of England might be tempted to speed up its rate reduction pace later in the year. The US...

Rates fell sharply yesterday following a weaker-than-expected ISM services report. The quarterly refunding announcement showed no significant shifts in how the Treasury plans to issue debt. With...

I am continually fascinated by how many second-order ‘understandings’ are missed, even by those people who have a really good first-order understanding of finance. For example, every financial...

Overall, the macro & liquidity conditions are still positive for risk assets. While equity market valuations are rich, especially in the US, earnings growth momentum is accelerating, and market...