Alhambra Investment Partners, LLC

The New Year has gotten off to a rocky start and I’m sure there are a number of market prognosticators out there wishing their trusty coin had come up heads rather than tails. That’s...

Downward SpiralEvery once in a great while, you run into a mainstream article or news story that actually breaks through the thick cloud of conventional nonsense that passes for expert commentary....

The Census Bureau released its estimates for November US trade. It was yet another debacle for the FOMC narrative about an economy poised to overheat. November was the month in between the two FOMC...

Factory orders shrank by 3.5% in November, which was actually the best monthly rate for 2015. Unfortunately, that continues a streak of 13 consecutive monthly declines as the manufacturing recession...

There no longer is any doubt about the state of industry and manufacturing in the US as well as the rest of the world. The most diehard, stubbornly optimistic economists have now completely given up...

There does seem to be internal financing adjustments going on inside the arcane and cumbersome framework of USD/CNY. Whether or not that is desirable remains to be seen, but the case of the past few...

I’ve been writing a weekly commentary now for almost ten years and I’ve missed very few weeks in that time. That’s a lot of Sunday afternoons and my lovely wife of 28 years has been...

The most important outbreak or story of 2015 had to have been the junk bond reversal. It combined all the major elements of what investors and economic agents are both fearing and, at one point in the...

China’s government or the PBOC moved to suspend three foreign banks from participating in cross-border currency transactions. From what I have seen, and nothing has been confirmed, rumors have...

While we await a flood of data for December spending and retail activity to confirm what we already suspect by proxy, the updated figures for November going backwards in the production process stand...

Before World War II, in Japan there were four large conglomerates situated as vertically-integrated family-centered monopolies. Called zaibatsu, they were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, and...

Repo rates were once again today above the upper “ceiling” of the FOMC’s intended corridor, marking three consecutive trading days exploring territory not meant to be reserved for...

The federal funds rate applies to a range of actual trades in unsecured overnight lending. What you see as the calculated “effective” rate is an average of those trades. Under the ZIRP/QE...

I haven’t reported much on the housing market this year because frankly it has been vastly surpassed by everything taking place (globally) with the “dollar” and the economy that...

The ongoing money market adjustment remains ongoing; perhaps that tautology is the most that can be interpreted from continuing mixed signals to this point though the longer nonconformities continue...

It doesn’t work as the math is surprisingly simple. That is why “sweeping” changes and reform have to be considered at each point of escalation. Taking account of what has occurred...