Trader’s Narrative

As the Fed Funds futures indicated, we got a 50 basis point cut. And since this was what the market expected and had come to rally for ahead of time, we got a muted response. I wrote early this morning:
“If we do get exactly 50 basis points, we could flail around and end the day […]

Why wait till it is over like the National Bureau of Economic Research does?
I’m officially announcing it: we are in a recession.
No, not because of the ISM report but because of this little factoid:

And according to Google Trends, a lot of people are freaking out about it:

The first spike up was after the February […]

The pundits are blaming the market’s stumble on Wednesday on the surprising reduction in the US manufacturing base - as measured by the Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM).
The ISM index fell to 47.7 - its lowest reading since April 2003. The “line in the sand” is 50, so anything above that is expansion and anything […]

So the Fed came in with a 25 basis point cut, as expected by the markets, and everything went to hell in a hand basket. Hmm, I wonder if you can tell when, exactly, the news came out:

The bond market closes at 3pm, while the equity markets close an hour later. So stocks had one […]

What if we are already in a recession? That is the question this article from the NY Times raised over the weekend.
Of course, this is an unanswerable riddle since the only way we know how to identify a recession is through hindsight, when it ceases to matter.
“With the core inflation rate comfortably close to 2 […]