Alhambra Investment Partners, LLC

The prevailing view is that the ECB will add to QE tomorrow in accompaniment of a further negative deposit rate floor. Whether or not Draghi and his orthodox economists have the gall to shunt the MRO...

Crude oil prices in the US have jumped back up to above $38 again, leading various financial correlations toward much less depressing interpretations (chiefly stocks). That in turn has allowed the...

Just a few weeks ago FactSet was reporting analysts’ estimates for Q1 2016 EPS were looking to be a 6.9% decline year-over-year. Their latest update now suggests -8.0%, as the deterioration in...

Going only from the conventional interpretation of the optimistic 242,000 in payroll gains Friday, it is still remarkable how more than one-fifth of those purported job creations in February were due...

Revolving consumer credit turned upward in March last year, which signaled to economists that the true end of the Great Recession was at hand. The largest impediment to the monetary version of the...

The fiscal year for retailers ended in January with nothing like what it was supposed to be. Still, as always, the suggestions remained that a rebound in consumerism would be before too long. If it...

Having established the farcical nature of wage interpretations on the shortest time scale, a wider contextual framework leads in the same direction of doubt. The point of any interest rate hike for...

When the unemployment rate tumbled toward 5% and now below it, economists thought that was overheating. For monetary policy, that was much of the basis for adjusting Fed communication (not rate hikes,...

Barclays (LON:BARC) has received all the media attention in the past few days after announcing its exit from Africa. Specifically, the bank intends to divest enough of its 62% stake in the Africa unit...

The ISM Manufacturing Index was reported at 49.5 for February 2016, up from 48.2 in January. It was the second consecutive rise for the overall index, December being the lowest, so the...

The Chicago Business Barometer fell sharply again in February, almost exactly as it had risen sharply in January. In fact, for the past year that has been the dominant pattern of sharp alternating...

At first economists wanted to just ignore oil prices, as they were to be “transitory” or even beneficial to consumers everywhere around the world. The fact that economists would actually...

The S&P 500 Index ((N:IVV)) has had a rough first part of the year. Having failed at strong resistance at both moving averages, the index was essentially in a freefall on its way down to the 1800...

When the Federal Reserve through its Open Market Desk engages in a transaction under QE or the current balance sheet stabilization (reinvesting maturing securities) with a primary dealer, the direct...

The advance estimate for Q4 GDP was not appreciably different than the preliminary figures, changing +0.6% into +1.00033%. It wasn’t anywhere close to enough of a revision to meaningfully alter...

Back in September 2015, FactSet estimated that EPS for the S&P 500 would grow by almost 5% in Q1 2016. Their latest update is now -6.9%. Energy, of course, gets most of the blame but according to...