Special Report
Memorial Day: Petrol prices and the summer inflation bump
American petrol prices averaged roughly $3.59 a gallon going into Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of the summer driving season, and motorists have no hedge.
Latest Headlines
Business
Nvidia's boom: peak or plateau?
Nvidia's data centre revenue reached $22.6 billion in the first quarter, up 427 per cent from a year earlier.
Markets & Finance
The Treasury starts buying back its own debt
The US Treasury has begun its first regular debt buyback programme since the early 2000s.
Economy
One soft inflation report: signal or noise?
The April consumer price index, published on 15 May, showed inflation at 3.4 per cent year-on-year, with core prices rising 0.3 per cent on the month, the first slowdown in four months.
Economy
Are workers finally getting more productive?
Non-farm business productivity grew at an annualized 0.3 per cent in the first quarter, while unit labour costs rose at 4.7 per cent.
Business
Apple's record $110bn buyback
Apple has authorized a $110 billion share buyback, the largest in American corporate history, alongside a modest dividend increase.
Markets & Finance
The Fed slows its balance-sheet shrinking
The Federal Reserve said at its May meeting that it will slow its quantitative tightening (QT) programme from June.
Explainer
How to spot Japan's secret yen buying
Japan's Ministry of Finance spent an estimated ¥9 trillion buying yen in two rounds of intervention, if the Bank of Japan's own current account projections are any guide.
Economy
Slow growth, sticky prices: a whiff of stagflation
US GDP grew at an annualized 1.6 per cent in the first quarter, well below forecasts, while the core PCE price index rose at an annualized 3.7 per cent.
Business
Meta spends more, investors flee
Meta Platforms shares fell 10.5 per cent in a single session after first-quarter results that were, on the face of it, solid.
Markets & Finance
The market gives up on rate cuts
Bond investors started the year pricing six Federal Reserve rate cuts. They have now priced out almost all of them.
Economy
Three hot months: what the data now says
January's hot inflation reading could be put down to seasonal quirks. March's cannot.
Economy
Powell admits cuts will take longer
Jerome Powell conceded on 16 April that persistent inflation will delay interest rate cuts, something the bond market had been pricing for weeks.
Special Report
Tax Day: What April tells us about the deficit
April's tax receipts give the bond market its clearest read of the year on federal revenue, which is why Tax Day matters more to Treasury desks than to accountants.
Business
Bank profits hold up in a higher-for-longer world
First-quarter results from Wall Street's biggest banks showed how well they have adapted to high interest rates.
World
How far will Japan let the yen fall?
The yen has slid towards 151.8 per dollar, its weakest level in thirty-four years.
Economy
Immigration changes the jobs maths
Non-farm payrolls rose by 303,000 in March and unemployment dipped to 3.8 per cent.
Economy
Inflation's stall isn't a seasonal fluke
For the first months of 2024, commentators blamed sticky inflation on leftover January seasonal effects and quirks in contract resets.
Business
Reddit's IPO lets the public in
Reddit’s shares rose forty-eight per cent on their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, after the company priced its offering at $34, the top of the marketed range.
World
Japan raised rates. The yen fell anyway
The Bank of Japan raised interest rates for the first time in seventeen years, and the yen fell.
Economy
The Fed nudges its long-run rate higher
The Federal Open Market Committee left its policy rate at 5.25–5.50 per cent in March.
World
Japan ends negative rates
The Bank of Japan ended seventeen years of unconventional policy on 19 March. It raised its overnight rate from minus 0.1 per cent to a range of zero to 0.1 per cent, scrapped Yield Curve Control and stopped buying ETFs.
Tech
Big Tech is now in the power business
Amazon has paid $650 million for a data centre campus wired directly to Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear power station.
Markets & Finance
The Fed's banking lifeline expires
The Federal Reserve stopped making new loans under its Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) on 11 March, closing the emergency facility it opened during the regional banking panic of 2023.
Economy
Why job numbers keep getting revised down
February’s payroll report showed a gain of 275,000 jobs, alongside a 167,000 downward revision to the previous two months.
Economy
The new normal for interest rates is higher
The Federal Reserve’s Summary of Economic Projections has started to back away from the idea of secular stagnation.
Business
Capital One's real prize in Discover: the network
Capital One has offered $35.3 billion in stock for Discover Financial, one of the boldest bank deals since the 2008 financial crisis.
Markets & Finance
Office loans are going bad
Office loan delinquencies in commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) have risen past 6.3 per cent, according to data from Trepp.
Tech
Nvidia adds $277bn in a day
Nvidia added $277 billion to its market value on 22 February, more than the entire worth of most companies in the S&P 500.
Economy
Japan and Britain slip into recession
Japan and Britain both slipped into technical recession in late 2023, according to fourth-quarter national accounts.
Business
NYCB's office loans come due
New York Community Bancorp’s earnings went badly wrong. The lender made a sudden $552 million provision and cut its dividend by seventy per cent, a sign that losses on commercial property are now reaching bank balance sheets.
Special Report
Valentine's Day: The chocolate crisis
Cocoa futures have broken records, passing $5,000 per metric ton after crop disease and extreme weather hit the main growing regions of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.
Markets & Finance
A hot inflation report hits short-term bonds
Headline inflation came in at 3.1 per cent in January and core prices rose by an uncomfortably hot 0.4 per cent on the month.
Special Report
Super Bowl: Does football predict the bond market?
The Super Bowl Indicator holds that a win for an NFC team heralds a bull market in shares and an AFC win a bear market.
Special Report
Lunar New Year: China's stock market can't escape falling prices
Chinese consumer prices fell 0.8 per cent in January from a year earlier, the steepest drop in fifteen years, and the country's stock markets enter the Year of the Dragon with little to celebrate.
Economy
Did inflation's progress survive the revisions?
On 9 February the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its annual benchmark revisions to the consumer price index, and bond traders watched nervously.
Economy
353,000 jobs and no March cut
Non-farm payrolls rose by 353,000 in January, far above forecasts, and December's figure was revised sharply higher.
Business
Meta pays its first dividend
Meta Platforms announced its first quarterly dividend, of $0.50 a share, together with a $50 billion addition to its share buyback programme.
Markets & Finance
The Treasury promises no more surprises
The US Treasury's February quarterly refunding statement was a small lesson in managing market nerves.
Economy
3.3% growth: too good to be true?
The US economy grew at an annualised rate of 3.3 per cent in the fourth quarter, ending 2023 well ahead of forecasts that had it slowing.
World
Japan wants pay rises before rate rises
The Bank of Japan kept its benchmark rate at minus 0.1 per cent in January, disappointing traders who had bet on an immediate end to negative rates.
Markets & Finance
Banks pay the bill for last year's failures
America's biggest banks are paying the last of the bill for the regional banking panics of early 2023.
Economy
Banks borrow from the Fed to earn more from the Fed
Banks found a profitable arbitrage in an obscure corner of the Federal Reserve's plumbing.
Economy
Why January inflation always looks bad
Markets have a bad habit of overreacting to January inflation figures. January consumer price data have tended to surprise on the upside, and each time bond desks panic for a while.
World
Shipping costs double as ships avoid the Red Sea
Spot container freight rates between Asia and Europe have more than doubled in three weeks as ships avoid the Suez Canal and take the 3,500-mile detour around Africa.
Markets & Finance
Seven stocks, almost a third of the market
Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla now account for nearly twenty-eight per cent of the S&P 500's market value.
Economy
The Fed's money drain is about to get real
The Federal Reserve's quantitative tightening (QT) programme has taken nearly $1 trillion of government and mortgage debt off its books without upsetting the financial plumbing.
Special Report
New Year: Markets want six rate cuts. They'll be disappointed
Forward markets start 2024 pricing in six quarter-point rate cuts, the first as early as March.
Special Report
New Year's Eve: A dead year for deals
Global mergers and acquisitions volume fell to roughly $3 trillion in 2023, the lowest in a decade, and advisory fees fell with it.
Economy
2023: The recession that never came
Twelve months ago almost every forecaster expected a US recession in 2023. Surveys in late 2022 put the probability at sixty-five per cent, an unusually high figure for a consensus view.
