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The stubborn inflation the Fed can't shake

For Federal Reserve officials scanning the inflationary horizon, the persistent stickiness of core services is becoming an analytical obsession.

China's lending engine sputters

Beijing’s traditional macroeconomic playbook is failing to produce its customary magic.

Why company defaults are creeping up

The post-pandemic corporate default cycle is arriving through an unfamiliar channel.

Britain's mortgage crunch returns

For British mortgage holders, the benign era of negligible debt service has ended with terrifying velocity.

What the Fed's forecasts really say

The Summary of Economic Projections released at the Federal Reserve’s June meeting was an exercise in quantitative defiance.

The Fed wants to pause without looking soft

Central banking is largely an exercise in rhetorical choreography, and the Federal Reserve’s impending June decision requires an unusually delicate routine.

A bull market built on seven stocks

The bull market has officially arrived, at least according to the arbitrary twenty per cent benchmark that equity commentators revere.

The Treasury refills its account, and markets pay

The plumbing of the global financial system is about to experience a high-pressure stress test.

The jobs report that disagrees with itself, again

Few macroeconomic rituals generate as much cognitive dissonance as the monthly US employment release, and the May figures were a masterpiece of statistical contradiction.

The debt deal that changes almost nothing

Fiscal summits in the US capital resemble nothing so much as a collective exercise in accounting cosmetic surgery.

Memorial Day: The debt deal is done. Now comes the bill

Political theatre in Washington has concluded with its customary anticlimax, but the financial reckoning is only just entering the order books.

Nvidia's forecast stuns Wall Street

On 24 May, Nvidia delivered an earnings release and forward guidance that will stand as one of the most stunning inflection points in modern corporate history.

Get ready for a flood of Treasury bills

As Washington negotiators inch toward an inevitable eleventh-hour compromise to suspend the statutory debt ceiling until 2025, wholesale money markets are bracing for the liquidity hangover.

Nobody can agree how much savings Americans have left

The primary macroeconomic debate of 2023 has coalesced around a deceptively simple question: how much money do American households have left in their pandemic savings accounts?

Why core inflation stopped falling

The publication of April’s consumer price index delivered a headline inflation rate that moderated to 4.9 per cent year-on-year—the first sub-5 per cent print in two years.

Office towers face a $1.5trn refinancing problem

The post-pandemic commercial real estate crisis has ceased to be an academic dispute over hybrid working trends; it has arrived on corporate balance sheets as a $1.5 trillion debt refinancing emergency.

When does America run out of money?

Why regional banks lost a third of their value

The KBW Regional Banking Index (KRE) has suffered an unmitigated structural collapse, plunging by more than 35 per cent since the initial failure of Silicon Valley Bank on 8 March.

Is this the Fed's last hike?

First Republic's final quarter: $100bn walks out the door

On 24 April, First Republic Bank finally published its first-quarter earnings report, and in doing so, laid bare the most catastrophic deposit run in modern commercial banking history.

Markets start pricing an American default

The United States sovereign credit default swap (CDS) market was long regarded as an academic backwater, an illiquid instrument traded by a handful of quantitative desks to hedge bizarre structural edge cases.

Tighter loans today, more defaults tomorrow

The Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) is rarely treated as front-page news, but within quantitative credit research, it is revered as the single most dependable leading indicator of commercial default cycles.

Tax Day: What April's tax cheques say about the debt ceiling

As millions of American taxpayers finalized their annual federal income tax filings on 18 April, quantitative analysts across Wall Street money market desks were performing their own high-stakes forensic calculations.

China is spending again. Its property market isn't

The real cost of the banking crisis: customers want interest

JPMorgan Chase kicked off the first-quarter bank earnings season with a spectacular financial performance, delivering record net revenue of $38.3 billion and a 52 per cent surge in net income.

The Treasury bills nobody wants to hold

The statutory debt ceiling is approaching its summer resolution, and the front end of the US Treasury curve has developed an unprecedented, pathological distortion.

Watching deposits leave in real time

In normal economic cycles, the Federal Reserve’s weekly H.8 release on commercial bank assets and liabilities is an arcane statistical publication read only by bank equity analysts and money market economists.

OPEC just made the Fed's job harder

On Sunday, 2 April, the OPEC+ alliance delivered an unexpected geopolitical thunderbolt across global commodity markets, announcing a surprise production cut of 1.16 million barrels per day.

First Republic has been rescued. It hasn't been saved

On 16 March, a consortium of eleven of America’s largest commercial banks, orchestrated by JPMorgan Chase and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, deposited $30 billion of uninsured cash into First Republic Bank.

Savers flee banks for money funds

The banking turmoil of March 2023 unleashed the fastest migration of retail and corporate capital in modern financial history.

Why Credit Suisse bondholders lost everything before shareholders

On Sunday, 19 March, the Swiss authorities detonated a legal and financial shockwave that shattered one of the most sacred doctrines of corporate finance.

Are bank failures doing the Fed's job for it?

As the dust settled on the frantic weekend that dismantled Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, Federal Reserve policymakers confronted a radically altered macroeconomic calculus ahead of their March FOMC meeting.

The Fed's quiet bailout of banks' bad bond bets

When the Federal Reserve published its weekly H.4.1 balance-sheet release on Thursday, 16 March, the numbers confirmed the staggering scale of the banking system’s emergency triage.

After SVB, the biggest bond rally since 1987

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank detonated an institutional panic across global capital markets, triggering the most violent flight-to-safety rally in sovereign debt since the Black Monday crash of October 1987.

How a bank run happens at the speed of an app

The sudden, cinematic demise of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will be remembered as the first true bank run of the smartphone era.

Powell signals bigger hikes are back

Jerome Powell’s semi-annual monetary policy testimony before the Senate Banking Committee was an unsparing rhetorical reset.

America's banks are sitting on $620bn of hidden losses

Could rates really hit 6%?

Only a few short weeks ago, anyone suggesting that the Federal Reserve might push the federal funds rate toward 6.0 per cent would have been dismissed as an alarmist trading outside institutional reality.

When the data changes after the decision

The January personal consumption expenditures (PCE) report arrived as a bitter shock to Eccles Building policymakers, with core PCE advancing 0.6 per cent month-on-month and lifting the annual rate to 4.7 per cent.

Did shoppers really spend 3% more in January?

The release of January’s US retail sales data delivered a thunderous headline advance of 3.0 per cent month-on-month, extinguishing talk of an imminent consumer rollover and prompting economists to scramble for their growth models.

Private credit's borrowers are feeling the squeeze

The private debt market spent the past decade marketing itself to institutional allocators as an all-weather paradise of floating-rate yield and superior structural protections.

Valentine's Day: Markets still love rate cuts. The Fed doesn't love them back

Financial markets have spent the past eighteen months engaged in an unrequited romance with Federal Reserve rate cuts.

Short-term bonds are having a terrible month

The month of February 2023 will be recorded across fixed-income trading floors as an unmitigated bloodbath for short-term sovereign debt.

Super Bowl: $7m for 30 seconds, and what it says about confidence

Last year's inflation just got rewritten

On 10 February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its routine annual seasonal revisions to the consumer price index, and in doing so, quietly rewrote the monetary history of late 2022.

517,000 jobs and the end of the rate-cut dream

The January establishment payroll report was a devastating reality check for the global bond market.

Meta's new growth story: buying back its own shares

When Meta Platforms reported fourth-quarter earnings, it delivered an anodyne revenue print and an uninspiring operating outlook.

How the Treasury is quietly pumping cash into markets

The economy grew 2.9%. Demand barely grew at all

America hits its debt limit again. The countdown starts

On 19 January, the United States federal government officially struck its statutory borrowing ceiling of $31.4 trillion, compelling Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to initiate "extraordinary measures" to keep the federal apparatus funded.