Archive for May, 2023

Perfect storm for 2019 recession

The House’s passage of the debt agreement is likely to jolt stocks into a relief rally, but how long can the new mojo drive the market up before relief from the political battle that held stocks back in May gives way to the enormous downdraft coming from hundreds of billions of dollars in new Treasury issuances the government will be making?

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You’ve heard the warnings many times from every direction. In fact, it is almost all you hear right now: default is a serious threat if the debt-ceiling is not raised: “The White House warned a US debt default will cause stocks to plunge 45% and will crash the US into a deep recession” and “JPMorgan warned that just getting close to the default scenario could create a market panic.”

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Fed Up Yet?

Posted May 15, 2023 By David Haggith

You would think the Fed wanted housing to become as overpriced as possible, having supported the market with $2.575 trillion in purchases of mortgaged back securities on its balance sheet to keep those securities flowing through with very low yields. That translated downward, of course, to very low mortgage rates, which the Fed sustained throughout […]

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The Fed’s fight has become much more complex this month. Inflation is fighting back harder all of a sudden, while the US debt ceiling is putting bond markets and banks at considerable risk by driving bond yields up even faster than the Fed was doing. This extra thrust is happening just as the Fed was trying to end its rate increases and even as additional banks are poised to collapse from the already-high bond rates. The situation appears to be cascading into a nuclear market meltdown.

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I was recently asked how on earth the Federal Reserve will get US citizens to convert to the purely digital currency the Fed has been talking about for a few years now. That’s a good question that I’ve dealt with a little in the past; and, since the Fed’s public rollout of its premier first step in that direction is scheduled for this July, now seems like a good time to recap all of that.

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