Alhambra Investment Partners, LLC

This past week, the S&P 500 Cap-Weighted Index (IVV) once again tested resistance at the 2100-2120 level, before finally blowing through to set new all-time highs for the market. It’s been a...

One of the consequences of last year’s junk bond blowup was, unsurprisingly, a dramatic decline in high-yield gross issuance. The numbers were pretty stark. According to SIFMA, high-yield gross...

Factory orders declined slightly year-over-year in May 2016, the 18th contraction in the past nineteen months (the only positive was February and its 29th day).On a seasonally adjusted (SA) basis,...

In a regime where math acts as money, there are a few major potential chokepoints where shifts in math can become systemically important difficulties. In 2008, the most visible example was in repo...

On November 4, 2010, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote his infamous oped for the Washington Post “welcoming” the world to a second round of quantitative easing. The very...

It might be expected that monetary policy would fail to achieve its goal in attempting to manage the economy when it cannot even meet its own basic technical requirements. The main lever of Fed policy...

A pretty wild day for the markets today after the UK voted to leave the European Union. Well, actually, it was just a referendum and non-binding but ignoring the will of the voters is not a good way...

There wasn’t anything new or surprising in the advance durable goods report. Shipments (ex transportation) were flat and orders were up 1% year-over-year (NSA). Capital goods (non-defense, ex...

On June 14, the 10-year German bund yield traded briefly below zero for the first time. It was an inauspicious record but one that defines the contradictions at the center of all this economic and...

Near the start of her tenure, Janet Yellen in a speech given on April 16, 2014, at the Economic Club of New York declared monetary policy concerned with three big factors. The first was inflation and...

In February 1999, the Bank of Japan announced that its call money rate would be zero “until deflationary concerns subside.” Other than a temporary shift in 2001 and 2006, deflationary...

With the sudden interjection of uncertainty halting the surge in Brexit odds since the unfortunate attack on British MP Jo Cox last week, the financial world has benefited from the pound’s...

The June FOMC meeting coincides with the quarterly update of the Federal Reserve’s modeled economic and policy projections. As usual, the economy forecasts have been cut for both 2016 and 2017....

There are those who are calling for James Bullard to be fired. While that might be deserved given recent history, I believe keeping his place at the head of the St. Louis Fed will do the world far...

So the FOMC voted against another rate hike yesterday, which in itself deserves no comment. Not even Esther George could muster a dissent as she has done nine of the previous eleven times. Notably the...

The Treasury International Capital (TIC) update for April showed a very large net decline in foreign (registered) holdings of US securities. The total net drop was $68.7 billion, the largest in one...