Alhambra Investment Partners, LLC

The UST yield curve continues to flatten (as it does elsewhere). All sorts of mainstream articles have been published lately about it. Many of them often refer to academic pieces ostensibly trying...

At this particular juncture eight months into 2018, the only thing that will help is abrupt and serious acceleration. On this side of May 29, it is way past time for it to get real. The global economy...

The FOMC statement for the July-August 2018 policy meeting exceeded expectations once more. It’s difficult for the Committee to continually do this since the whole point of these things is to...

I suppose it’s only fair. After all, they started it. Earlier in the year, Federal Reserve officials including Chairman Jay Powell suggested it was all Trump’s fault. The abrupt...

What is it that’s different in August? If there was some relative calm in global markets in June and July it certainly disappeared this month. The dollar shot higher and global liquidity...

I was going to write that there was bad news out of Japan last night, but is there really any other kind? I know that from time to time Japan’s various rebounds over the years are characterized...

Americans are spending more on filling up. A lot more. According the Census Bureau, retail sales at gasoline stations had increased by nearly 20% year-over-year (unadjusted) in both May and June 2018....

Overshadowed by the “dollar” last week was the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS reported the US CPI had increased in July 2018 by the highest rate since December 2011. Running at 2.95%...

There is just something about August. It is irresistible, apparently, in all the wrong ways. For starters, there are big ones and small ones but somehow they all line up against liquidity and...

I’ve seen a lot of commentary lately describe conditions as if things are calmed down. There was a bit of growth scare, a little T-bill indigestion earlier in the year. The Chinese are somehow...

In October 2015, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Pedigree matters, a fact easily established by how easy it is for central bankers and former...

The risk budget is unchanged again this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between bonds and risk assets is evenly split. The only change to the portfolio is the one I wrote about...

Total construction spending rose 5.5% year-over-year (unadjusted) in June 2018. On a seasonally-adjusted basis, spending fell rather sharply two months ago though that doesn’t really matter...

Argentina has had a good month of July. When last we checked toward the end of June, the peso was still plummeting. It would nearly close below 29, an absolutely astounding drop that made plain this...

With the switch to the 2012 reference, the new fixed dollar comparison makes revisions in the PCE Deflator a bit springier. Lows are a little lower; highs a little higher. At the bottom in 2009...

One soft indication of how far things have gone is Bloomberg. Six or eight months ago, its newsfeed was filled with uniformly apocalyptic hyperbole over inflation. The tight labor market, according to...