The national deficit debate usually focuses on entitlement and defense spending. While they have merit, they miss the single largest driver of America’s deteriorating fiscal picture. After the pandemic-related deficits, the cost of borrowing itself, not spending, has been the biggest deficit buster. As shown in the first graph, in 2021, the government paid $482 […]
Kevin Warsh delivered his first semiannual testimony to Congress earlier this week. In it, he used every opportunity to stress the urgency of returning inflation to the Fed’s 2% target. To wit, he stated, “Inflation will be a thing of the past.” He also said the Fed “has no tolerance for persistently elevated inflation.” The […]
A reader recently asked us: “Why are BDCs diverging from corporate junk bonds?” To his point, the graph below shows the ICE BOA index of BB and B yield spreads to Treasuries are at or near 30-year lows. At the same time, BDCs, which hold lower-rated credit loans to small and mid-sized companies, are trading […]
Coming in on Tuesday morning, investors were expecting to sift through earnings from the largest banks and the CPI data. Instead, IBM stunned investors by pre-releasing its earnings 8 days in advance. Its earnings were much weaker than expected, with revenue well below expectations and EPS declining 2% year over year. As shown below, IBM […]
Semiconductor chip companies have been benefiting from strong momentum and a powerful narrative. For instance, memory chip producers like Micron, AMD, and Intel have risen by 192%, 138%, and 166%, respectively, year to date. While they provided a nice boost to the Nasdaq and an impressive, albeit lesser, tailwind to the S&P 500, the impact […]
The graph below paints a very interesting picture of US energy efficiency and a key structural economic change in this country. For roughly 25 years after WWII, the US economy’s crude oil consumption nearly tripled. Feeding the growth were a booming post-war economy and strong population growth. To put consumption in a different context, the […]
The FOMC released the minutes from Chair Warsh’s first meeting on Wednesday, and the best word to describe the Fed’s advice is “ambiguous.” Merriam-Webster defines ambiguous as a state or, in this case, a statement that allows for more than one interpretation. Officials entertained policy scenarios in both hawkish and dovish ways. Some see inflation […]
Goldman Sachs’s volatility desk made the following comment: “With the VIX back to its lowest levels in more than a month, our Vol desk is focused on hedging opportunities as 1-month S&P implied correlation is near its lowest level in 20 years.” Simply, a low VIX can convey a sense of market calm on the […]
Michael Howell, founder of CrossBorder Capital, is one of the most followed global liquidity analysts. Howell’s Global Liquidity Index (GLI) often tracks closely to a 65-month sine-wave cycle that has tracked liquidity conditions well since 1965. As we share below, the 65- month cycle (green) bottomed in October 2022 and peaked in August 2025, exactly […]