International
The Market Is Not The Economy: Germany Enters Recession With DAX At Record High
The Market Is Not The Economy: Germany Enters Recession With DAX At Record High
The old mantra that ‘the market is not the economy’ has never…

The old mantra that 'the market is not the economy' has never been more true than in Germany as the country's stock market continues to surge to record highs as the nation's economy enters recession.
Germany suffered its first recession since the start of pandemic, extinguishing hopes that Europe’s top economy could escape such a fate after the war in Ukraine sent energy prices soaring.
Q1 GDP shrank 0.3% from the previous three months following a 0.5% drop between October and December.
“The reluctance of households to buy was apparent in a variety of areas,” the office said in a statement.
“Households spent less on food and beverages, clothing and footwear, and on furnishings.”
They also purchased fewer electric cars as incentives were reduced.
But, of course, markets shrugged off Thursday’s numbers - despite their implications for the wider performance of the 20-nation euro zone - because all that matters is liquidity and shitty econ numbers means a dovish pressure on the ECB at the margin which has been completely conditioned into investors' minds as a "BTFD" driver.
Sure enough, Germany's DAX is hitting new record highs, despite, as Bloomberg reports,companies like Zalando SE reflect the flagging consumer sentiment. The fashion retailer saw inventory levels driven higher in the first quarter by falling demand. Domestic car orders, meanwhile, were down by about a third between January and April, according to the VDA auto industry association.
The key manufacturing sector is also proving to be a problem: A deepening downturn is casting doubt on the rebound many anticipate for the coming quarters.
“We must turn the corner in economic policy and put an end to the neglect of our competitiveness,” Finance Minister Christian Lindner said in Berlin, adding that this included the “acceleration of planning and approval procedures and strengthening the idea of technological freedom in order to leverage our creative potential.”
Not if you want the markets to keep going up.
“The optimism at the start of the year seems to have given way to more of a sense of reality,” ING economist Carsten Brzeski said in a report to clients.
“A drop in purchasing power, thinned-out industrial order books as well as the impact of the most aggressive monetary policy tightening in decades, and the expected slowdown of the US economy all argue in favor of weak economic activity.”
Well, it seems stock market investors seem pretty optimistic to us? Forget BTFD, it's Buy The F**king Stagflationary Spiral
International
Canadian dollar edges higher as retail sales rebound
Canada retail sales climb 2% The Canadian dollar has posted losses on Friday. In the European session, USD/CAD is trading at 1.3446, down 0.28%. Canada’s…

- Canada retail sales climb 2%
The Canadian dollar has posted losses on Friday. In the European session, USD/CAD is trading at 1.3446, down 0.28%.
Canada’s retail sales jump
Canada’s retail sales rebounded in impressive fashion on Friday. Retail sales in July jumped 2% y/y, following a -0.6% reading in June and beating the 0.5% consensus estimate. On a monthly basis, retail sales rose 0.3%, up from 0.1% in June but shy of the consensus estimate of 0.4%. The good news was tempered by the August estimate, which stands at -0.3% m/m and would be the first decline since March. The Canadian dollar showed little reaction to the retail sales release.
The Bank of Canada doesn’t meet again until October 25th and policy makers will have plenty of data to monitor in the meantime. The BoC has been walking a tightrope that will be familiar to most central banks, that of trying to balance the risks of over and under-tightening. The difficulty in finding the right balance was highlighted in the BoC summary of deliberations of the policy meeting earlier this month.
The BoC decided to hold the benchmark rate at 5.0% after concluding that earlier rate hikes were having an effect and slowing economic growth. The summary indicated that policy makers were concerned that a pause might send the wrong message that rate cuts might be on the way. With inflation still above the BOC’s target, the central bank is not looking at rate cuts and stressed at the September meeting that rate hikes were still on the table and that inflation remained too high.
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USD/CAD Technical
- USD/CAD is testing resistance at 1.3468. The next resistance line is 1.3553
- 1.3408 and 1.3323 are the next support lines
International
Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields
Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields
Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,
The Bank of England’s…

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,
The Bank of England’s quantitative tightening program shows that unwinding central-bank bond portfolios, even with outright sales, need not be disruptive for markets. The greater risk for US and global yields comes from positive stock-bond correlations driving risk premia wider.
The BOE has been a pioneer and a thought leader in QT. While the Fed and ECB have only allowed bonds to run off naturally to help achieve their balance-sheet contraction goals, the BOE has sold gilts outright in addition to allowing bonds to mature.
So far, it has not led to any significant market disruption. This enabled the BOE Thursday to increase the pace of reduction in the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) from £80 billion last year to £100 billion over the coming 12 months from October (while holding Bank Rate steady). As colleague Ven Ram also noted, the schedule of maturing bonds next year allowed the bank to keep gilts sales unchanged from last year while increasing the total amount of the APF’s decrease.
The QT watchwords from the bank are “gradual and predictable.” If gilt sales are conducted in such a way, then market disruption should be minimized. The chart below shows the BOE’s own assessment of the impact of bond sales on the market.
The BOE estimates that of the ~40 bps of term-premium increase since the MPC voted to begin QT in February 2022, about 10-15 bps comes from QT specifically – small in comparison to the overall rise in yields since that time.
QT or bond sales, though, are not the most critical risk facing bond prices in the current cycle. Rising and now positive stock-bond correlations threaten to lead to a structural rise in bond risk premium, and lower prices. The correlation is now positive in the US, Japan, and the UK.
In a positive stock-bond correlation world, bonds lose their portfolio-hedge and recession-hedge capabilities, and thus become less sought after. The penny has not fully dropped yet, but the negative term premium for bonds is increasing, and is prone to rising much higher as they become less desirable.
Yields of developed market countries are biased structurally higher, but QT is unlikely to be the culprit. Instead, it allows central banks to reload their capacity for a future time when they may need to restart quantitative easing, in order to stabilize the market from sharply rising term premia.
International
How ducks, geese and swans see the world – and why this puts them at risk in a changing environment
Our airspace has only started to become cluttered recently – many birds are struggling to navigate through it.

Each year, millions of birds fly into power lines, wind turbines and the other man-made structures that litter the open air space. These collisions frequently result in the death of birds and, if power systems go down, disrupt our lives and pose financial challenges for power companies.
Numerous bird species, including macaws in Brazil, geese and swans in the UK, and blue cranes in South Africa have been found to be susceptible to collisions with power lines. But any flying bird can fall victim to such a collision.
In some places, these collisions happen so often that they can jeopardise local populations of endangered species.
But birds are highly evolved flying machines. They can fly in tightly packed flocks that weave and turn to our delight and wonder. So why do they fly into things?
According to our latest research, the answer lies in how they see the world. We found that looking directly ahead is simply not that important to many species of duck, geese and swans.

How birds see the world
Exploring the reasons behind why birds are victims of collisions has led to new ideas that challenge our fundamental perception of what birds are. In the past, scientists have described birds as “a wing guided by an eye”. This implies that flight has been central to moulding bird vision throughout their evolution.
But now it is safe to conclude that a bird is instead best characterised as “a bill guided by an eye”. Rather than flight, the main driver of the evolution of bird vision has been the key tasks associated with foraging, in particular detecting food items and getting the bill to the right place at the right time in order to seize them. Alongside the detection of predators, this is the task that bird vision has to get right day in, day out.
Birds differ in how much the view from each eye overlaps (called the binocular field of view). The more the eyes look straight ahead, the more the view from each eye will overlap – much as human eyes do – thus broadening the binocular field. For a bird such as a duck, with its eyes positioned high up on either side of the head, the view from each eye will be very different (with smaller binocular field).
We measured binocular field size across a broad range of 39 species of duck, geese and swans. We found that the key driver of diversity in vision between species is their diet and how they forage for food.
Birds that primarily use their vision to locate foods such as seeds, or selectively graze on plants, tend to have broader binocular fields.
However, the binocular fields of species like mallards and pink-eared ducks are much narrower. These birds rely less on their eyes for foraging and more on touch cues from their bills. The vision of birds like these instead provides them with a comprehensive view of the region above and behind their heads.
Birds certainly need to have some visual coverage in front of them. But with eyes placed high on the side of the head, resulting in a very narrow binocular field, they are restricted to retrieving rather scant detail from the distant scene ahead. What matters to them more is placing their bill accurately at a close distance and seeing who is coming at them from the side or from behind.

This finding is not confined to ducks, geese and swans. It probably generalises to all birds, except perhaps some owls (which have more front-facing eyes and rely upon sound to locate prey). The great majority of birds are therefore vulnerable to collisions.
However, it is larger birds like geese, swans and bustards that face real problems. Their restricted forward vision is compounded by flying fast and being unable to change direction quickly. These birds also often fly in flocks, and at dusk and dawn when the light level is lower.
Warning birds of hazards ahead
Understanding the vision of birds from the perspective of foraging and predator detection improves our understanding of what causes collisions. But, more importantly, it allows us to do something about it.
We must not assume that a bird’s view of the world is the same as ours. We are specialised primates with eyes on the front of our heads, and we see the world in a very different way to birds, not only with respect to visual fields but also acuity and colour vision. So, we must try to take a proper “birds’ eye view” of the problem.
Birds are also flying fast. But, as they do so, they are taking in only gross information of what lies ahead – much as we do when driving our cars. As with car hazard warnings, it is necessary to alert birds using markers that may seem excessive.
Birds that are vulnerable to collisions have evolved to fly in airspace that only recently has started to become cluttered. To be clearly visible to a bird, especially to species like ducks and geese, devices that warn birds about hazards ahead must be large, highly contrasting and produce flicker.
When marking hazards, there is no place for subtlety.
Jenny Cantlay received funding from NERC and the RSPB for her doctoral research on avian vision whilst at Royal Holloway University.
Graham Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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