Markets & Finance
Boxing Day: The year-end squeeze in money markets
While equity investors enjoyed eggnog and a holiday rally, money market desks were dealing with the annual squeeze that comes with year-end balance-sheet reporting.
Special Reports
Markets & Finance
Christmas: Is the Santa rally real?
Wall Street greets the last trading days of December with talk of the 'Santa Claus rally', the statistical habit of shares drifting higher into year-end.
Economy
Cyber Monday: Record spending on borrowed money
American shoppers spent $12.4 billion online on Cyber Monday, a record for a single day.
Business
Black Friday: Retailers finally have the right amount of stock
Black Friday found American shops with tidy shelves, sensible stock levels and hardly any panic clearance sales.
Markets & Finance
Thanksgiving: Bond investors finally have something to be thankful for
The ten-year Treasury yield has fallen from its October peak of 5.02 per cent to about 4.40 per cent, handing bond funds large mark-to-market gains just in time for Thanksgiving.
World
Diwali: India's festive boom runs on credit
Car dealers, electronics retailers and jewellers across India reported record sales over Diwali, helped along by the fastest growth of any major economy.
World
Singles' Day: China's shoppers have lost their nerve
Alibaba and JD.com again declined to publish gross merchandise volume figures for Singles' Day, the second year running, and offered only vague claims that transactions had grown.
Business
Halloween: The zombie companies are rising
Ten-year yields are near 5 per cent and base rates stand at 5.5 per cent, and the companies kept alive by cheap money are running out of time.
Markets & Finance
Anniversary: Our first year, graded
This column began a year ago on a simple premise, that the steepest central bank tightening in forty years would sooner or later collide with private balance sheets.
Economy
Labor Day: The job market is cooling the right way
For eighteen months economic orthodoxy held that bringing inflation down would require a painful jump in unemployment.
Business
Prime Day: What Amazon's discounts say about inflation
Shoppers spent an estimated $12.7 billion over Amazon's two-day Prime Day, an event that has become a rough gauge of how American consumers are holding up and what retailers can charge.
U.S.
Independence Day: Washington is paying factories to come home
Through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, Washington is handing out tens of billions of dollars in grants, loans and tax credits to bring factories home.
Business
Memorial Day: The debt deal is done. Now comes the bill
Negotiators agreed on 27 May to suspend the debt ceiling, and Washington's political drama ended in its usual anticlimax.
Personal Finance
Tax Day: What April's tax cheques say about the debt ceiling
Millions of Americans filed their federal income tax returns by 18 April, and money market desks on Wall Street spent the day doing sums of their own.
Economy
Valentine's Day: Markets still love rate cuts. The Fed doesn't love them back
January's consumer prices rose at a 6.4 per cent annual pace, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Valentine's Day, and markets' eighteen-month infatuation with Federal Reserve rate cuts was once again shown to be one-sided.
Business
Super Bowl: $7m for 30 seconds, and what it says about confidence
Thirty seconds of advertising during Super Bowl LVII, between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, cost a record $7 million.
World
Lunar New Year: China's reopening lifts the yuan
The yuan had a good Lunar New Year. Having flirted with 7.35 to the dollar in late October, the onshore and offshore rates rallied back toward 6.78, one of the fastest percentage recoveries on record.
Economy
New Year: Everyone expects a recession. That's the warning sign
About 65 per cent of economists surveyed at Wall Street banks and independent research firms expect a US recession within the next twelve months, and that degree of agreement should worry any experienced investor as 2023 begins.
Markets & Finance
New Year's Eve: The year the classic portfolio failed
The classic 60/40 portfolio lost about 17 per cent in 2022, a historic drawdown that left wealth managers and pension trustees with nowhere liquid to hide.
Business
Boxing Day: The $816bn problem of returned presents
The National Retail Federation expects US consumers to return about $816 billion of merchandise in 2022, and the post-holiday flood of returns is where retail margins go to die.
Markets & Finance
Christmas: Why markets go quiet — and fragile — at year-end
Markets slow to a crawl in the last days of the trading year, and casual observers take that for calm.
Economy
Cyber Monday: What the discounts say about inflation
Americans spent an estimated $11.3 billion online on Cyber Monday 2022, according to Adobe Analytics, a record in nominal terms for the annual shopping day.
Markets & Finance
Black Friday: Shop now, pay later, default sooner
US credit card balances reached $930 billion in the third quarter of 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's latest household debt report, up fifteen per cent on a year earlier.
Business
Thanksgiving: Why your turkey cost 20% more
A classic Thanksgiving dinner for ten now costs an average of $64.05, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation's annual survey, twenty per cent more than it did a year ago.
Business
Singles' Day: Alibaba stops showing its numbers
Alibaba did not publish its Singles' Day sales total on 11 November 2022, the first time in the festival's fourteen-year history that it has kept the number to itself.
Markets & Finance
Halloween: The scariest year for bonds in memory
The US Aggregate bond index is heading for a loss of close to 15 per cent this year, which would make 2022 the worst calendar year for bond investors since the founding of the republic.
World
Diwali: India's gold habit is weighing on the rupee
The rupee has fallen past 83 to the dollar for the first time, and India's households are about to buy a great deal of gold.
