Since last week, while the market was distracted by the geopolitical slapping contest between Israel and Iran, both large banks (#KBE) and regional banks (#KRE) lost 5%, outpacing the S&P500 by more than 2%. JP Morgan, surprisingly, is leading the tumble, down almost 8% since releasing its Q1-24 results. Bank…
Category:Macro
NOW THAT THE JAPAN MAGIC MONEY TREE IS DEAD, EXPECT BANKS TO JUMP AT EACH OTHER’S THROATS
The answer to any problem Japan faced in the past 3 decades was “let’s just print our way out of it” and every time the global financial system was more than happy to swallow every drop of freshly printed #JPY. What were banks doing with all that money that “magically”…
STOCKS’ PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: IGNORE EVERYTHING, EVEN THE BASIC LAWS OF FINANCIAL GRAVITY
The discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation model is a fundamental tool used in finance to estimate the intrinsic value of a company based on its expected future cash flows. It is based on the “time value of money” — the basic law of finance (a dollar received in the future…
JANET’S TOOTHLESS YELLING IN CHINA
Things can change a lot in 9 months, particularly when you spend those 9 months trying to kneecap (metaphorically speaking) your adversary after pretending to be “besties”. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s second trip to #China is so far a total failure with little to no chance of any improvement…
AFTER LOSING THEIR GRIP ON GOLD, ARE THE FED AND THE US GOVERNMENT ABOUT TO LOSE THEIR GRIP ON OIL PRICES TOO?
Was anyone surprised to see #FED chairman Jerome Burns walking on stage today and saying out loud all those buzzwords that for a while have been pretty effective in feeding investors’ euphoria? I wasn’t, after all, it was already pretty clear after the last #FOMC that the real fed mandate…
NOW MORE AND MORE PEOPLE REALISE WHEN YOU CHASE UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS, YOU ARE INVESTING IN HALLUCINATIONS.
In December, people were literally salivating, dreaming of the flood of liquidity six #FED rate cuts would have delivered to the market in 2024. Fast forward 3 months into 2024, the expectations now are for 2 rate cuts and falling. Was the expectation of six #FED FF rate cuts unrealistic?…
HOW LONG CAN THE FED DELAY JAPAN’S (INEVITABLE) ECONOMIC IMPLOSION?
The USD dollar keeps strengthening and currently, the $DXY index is trading again above 105 or up ~0.77% in the past 5 days. What about the $USD / $JPY exchange rate? It’s only up ~0.14% while, instead, it should already be trading above 152, also considering the move in US…
AFTER #BITCOIN DID IT, NOW #GOLD IS SOUNDING THE ALARM
What are the differences between #Bitcoin and #Gold? If you put aside any personal views and stick with their pure characteristics, the two are not truly different from a monetary perspective: 1 – Both have limited supply, but at the same time, they can be divided into very minuscule units….
WHY IS #JAPAN SO SCARED ABOUT $JPY CROSSING 152 AGAINST THE $USD?
Crossing a specific FX level isn’t usually a “big deal”. What would be the difference for a country between settling payments at 151.95 or 152.05? Intuitively, it’s quite small. However, there are 2 specific markets where a “round number” can be a very big deal: derivatives and margin lending. Why?…
A LESSON FROM #CHINA’S MIDDLE CLASS: PAY YOUR DEBTS UNTIL YOU CAN AFFORD TO DO SO. THE ALTERNATIVE? DEBT SLAVERY
There are times when I believe that if there wasn’t a massive cultural and language barrier between #China and the major Western countries, in particular with the #US (while #Germany would love to deal more with #China commercially if they still had the option to do so), both parts of…