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Weekly Market Pulse: Inflation Scare!

The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial stock averages made new all time highs last week as bonds sold off, the 10 year Treasury note yield briefly breaking above 1.7% before a pretty good sized rally Friday brought the yield back to 1.65%. And thus…

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The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial stock averages made new all time highs last week as bonds sold off, the 10 year Treasury note yield briefly breaking above 1.7% before a pretty good sized rally Friday brought the yield back to 1.65%. And thus we’re right back where we were at the end of March when the 10 year yield hit its high for the year. Or are we? Well, yes, the 10 year is back where it was but that doesn’t mean everything else is and, as you’ve probably guessed, they aren’t. In the early part of this year, the 10 year yield was rising as anticipation built for a surge in post vaccination economic growth. The 10 year yield rose about 85 basis points from the beginning of the year to the peak in late March. 10 year TIPS yields, meanwhile, were also rising, a little more than 50 basis points. There was agreement between the two that growth expectations were improving, inflation expectations rising a bit more than real growth expectations. The 10 year Treasury ended March right about where it was last Thursday, 1.7%. But there is considerably less agreement between the two markets now with the 10 year TIPS yield still 35 basis points lower (more negative) than the March peak.

So, no, things are not back where they were. The recent rise in nominal bond yields is much more about inflation fears than growth hopes. Markets provide us with a wealth of information that allows us, to some degree, to get inside the heads of investors. The changes in the bond markets recently show that investors have a very specific and nuanced view about the economy. They are certainly concerned about inflation and doing what people do when they are scared – trying to protect themselves. TIPS have been very popular of late for exactly that reason, as the inflation narrative gets louder and louder. But what is interesting is that, in a way, investors are taking the Fed at its word, that the inflation is transitory. The 5 year breakeven inflation rate hit 2.91% last week while the 10 year rose to 2.64%. But the 5 year, 5 year forward rate (5 year inflation expectations starting 5 years hence), has fallen over the last week to 2.37%. Investors think inflation will average nearly 3% over the next 5 years but less than 2.4% over the following 5. So investors do see inflation as transitory even if their definition of the term seems quite a bit different than the Fed’s.

Another big difference between now and March is the steepness of the yield curve. The 2 year note yield has been on a steep rise of late, up 140% since the beginning of September, with most of that coming in October. The 2 year rate roughly doubled in the early part of the year too but the absolute change was small because rates started so low. The recent change in the 2 year has been more rapid than the 10 and is being driven by expectations for Fed policy changes. The 10/2 curve was 1.58% at the end of March but just 1.18% today. The short term trend is still toward steeper but the climb has stalled a bit:

I interpret these changes in the obvious way. Nominal growth expectations are rising with most of the recent change focused on inflation but with some pickup in real growth expectations too. In addition, investors do not seem willing to believe yet that inflation is a long term problem. Given the high profile of the inflation narrative and the lack of much concrete evidence of a growth pickup, these changes seem perfectly rational and reasonable. I think it is important to note too that these changes in inflation expectations are small but also rapid. The 10 year breakeven rate is up about 65 basis points this year but over half of that has happened in the last month. The same is true for the 5 year breakeven rate. As for the change in real growth expectations I’d just say that it isn’t very impressive regardless of the rate of change. Unfortunately, that makes sense too since, as I discussed last week, we haven’t done anything to change the trajectory of either workforce or productivity growth. My long term expectation for growth hasn’t changed much since the first few months of COVID. We came into it with growth averaging roughly 2.2% over the previous decade. After adding a lot of debt to that economy during the pandemic my assumption is that, when things finally settle out from the virus and the response to it, economic growth will be lower. How much? I don’t know of any way to quantify that.

But that long term expectation is just that, long term. It doesn’t say anything about growth over the near term, the next 6 to 12 months. We’ll get a report on Q3 GDP next week and all indications are that it will be a pretty big fall off from the first half of the year. But anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention knows that so it really won’t matter. Investors will be focused on the current quarter and the one after that. Will there be a reacceleration in growth as the delta variant fades? Will businesses be able to get goods for Christmas or will America get a lump of coal in its stocking? Or are we out of coal too? I don’t know but I do think we need to be careful about getting too negative about, at least, the immediate future. Inflation expectations can change rapidly while growth expectations take more time so TIPS and nominal yields are often on different songs, even if in the same hymnal.

I don’t generally put much emphasis on the PMIs or regional Fed surveys. They are basically sentiment surveys and rely on people’s anecdotal observations which, as we know, can be skewed for a whole host of reasons. But they can be interesting at turning points, inflection points, where sentiment does have a bearing on actions and ultimately the economy. While I don’t think we’re near a negative inflection point, the Philly Fed survey and the Markit PMIs do seem to point to a more positive near term outlook. The Philly Fed survey itself was down considerably from September but it is still higher than 3 months ago and the details hint at a near term pickup. The new orders index rose to 30.8 from 15.9, employment to 30.7 from 26.3. They also asked a special question about capital spending plans that showed expectations for increased spending in 5 of 6 categories for next year:

Of course, those expectations could change dramatically if Q4 turns out to be a bust but it is, for now, a positive indication for future growth.

The Markit PMIs also offered some near term optimism as the overall measure rose to 57.3 from 55 in September. That’s the best in 3 months with a sharp rise in service sector activity and a 3rd consecutive month of slowing in manufacturing activity (which is still at a high level). New orders in services rose at the fastest pace in 3 months. Job creation was the highest since June although companies still report having a hard time finding workers. All of this is perfectly consistent with the expectations for a growth resurgence post delta. Will those expectations be met? I don’t know obviously but if these expectations start to be met, we should see a response in the bond market with better balance between TIPS and nominal bonds.

There was also some potentially good news in the Census Bureau’s weekly household pulse survey which showed a big drop in people reporting not working.

Again, I don’t think we should put a lot of emphasis on these surveys. I’m always more interested in what people are doing rather than what they say they’re doing and especially what they say they intend to do. But these seem to be more significant changes than we’d normally see month to month.

We’re going through a bit of an inflation scare right now and we can see the changes in markets. They are fairly small changes though and they can, probably will, change again in coming weeks. Growth and inflation expectations are always changing as new information enters the market. Millions of investors speculate about how the future will look and their bets on that future move markets as new consensus expectations emerge. And the market changes that come from these new expectations also affect the economy in an ongoing feedback loop that changes expectations and markets again in a never ending search for equilibrium. The ebb and flow of the markets and the economy are intertwined, one influencing the other to produce the best prediction of the future we’ll ever get. Just don’t get too attached to that future because it can – and often does – change quickly.

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The economic environment is unchanged.

The trend in the nominal 10 year rate is obviously up

But we’re interested mostly in real growth expectations and TIPS yields are not in an uptrend yet:

The dollar remains in a short term uptrend but we are at a pretty obvious resistance point. In addition, the futures market shows a pretty strong preference by speculators for the long side of the dollar trade. So the short term trend may be running into some trouble and with real rates still flailing at low levels, I think that makes a lot of sense. The real long term trend of the dollar is no trend at all, still stuck in the middle of a 10% trading range that has prevailed for now 7 years:

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Despite my comments above about the Philly Fed survey and the Markit PMIs (not shown here), the economic data wasn’t that encouraging last week. Industrial production was down for the second straight month but there were a lot of caveats. Hurricane Ida is alleged to have taken 0.6% off the total and the auto industry is still flagging due to the chip shortage. Mining output (shale) was down, shocking exactly no one except maybe Joe Biden. On a more positive note, IP rose at a 4.3% annual rate in Q3, the fifth consecutive quarterly gain over 4%.

The Housing Market Index rose in September with single family especially strong. But the news on the new home front otherwise was not that great with starts and permits both down. Existing home sales did have a big rise but that was probably driven by rising mortgage rates.

 

A lot of data releases next week with GDP the highlight for most observers. The more important items will be the CFNAI to get an idea of how much we’ve slowed overall, durable goods orders and especially core capital goods orders, personal income and consumption and consumer sentiment.

 

 

We were reminded last week that US markets are still under the spell of speculators when a SPAC announced a deal with an entity associated with Donald Trump. Digital World Acquisition Corp. rose from $10 to, at one point, over $170 in two days of trading last week before settling the week up a mere 9 fold to $94.20. SPACs are Special Purpose Acquisition Corps or more commonly blank check companies. The fact that these companies with no business plan beyond a vague notion to purchase an operating company are so popular, is an indication by itself, of the speculative nature of these markets. But when a blank check company with no business plan acquires a shell company that consists of a powerpoint presentation and the stock has to come down to be up 9 fold in a couple of days, well, I think we’ve entered something beyond speculation. This is the post-modern economy where value is socially determined, reality is anything but objective, “where there are no hard distinctions between what is real and and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false”. It is an absurd world where the value of Donald Trump’s future social media empire is determined through the interactions of speculators on existing social media.

Back in the real world, stocks were up last week with the US continuing to outperform. Growth had a good week and the value/growth debate YTD now amounts to a draw. China rebounded last week as Evergrande made an interest payment and you may see a rebound in Chinese markets as people get comfortable with the heavier hand of the communist party. I’m going to have to miss that if it happens as I am decidedly not comfortable with China. There are other places in Asia that look a lot more attractive in my opinion, Japan prominent among them.

 

 

Real estate has recovered quickly and led last week but financials continue to perform well too. Healthcare had a good week after lagging recently.

With stocks near or at all time highs, it is easy to assume that means something about future economic growth. But stocks move based on expectations about future EPS growth which isn’t even close to the same thing. Last week’s move up in stock prices was more likely a consequence of the death of the corporate tax hike as the Biden economic plan continues to get pared down to something more manageable. The economy just isn’t the focus of stock investors right now but that could change if growth doesn’t pick up soon from the big Q3 slowdown. There is little evidence of that yet beyond the surveys I mentioned above so we won’t guess at the outcome. If real rates join nominal rates and start to rise more decisively, that will be a sign that we can be more optimistic. But we aren’t there yet.

Joe Calhoun

 

 

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Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes

After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…

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After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.

Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.

These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.

Another excerpt:

That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.

Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis…

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People who recovered from COVID-19 and received a COVID-19 shot were more likely to suffer adverse reactions, researchers in Europe are reporting.

A medical worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a patient at a vaccination center in Ancenis-Saint-Gereon, France, on Nov. 17, 2021. (Stephane Mahe//Reuters)

Participants in the study were more likely to experience an adverse reaction after vaccination regardless of the type of shot, with one exception, the researchers found.

Across all vaccine brands, people with prior COVID-19 were 2.6 times as likely after dose one to suffer an adverse reaction, according to the new study. Such people are commonly known as having a type of protection known as natural immunity after recovery.

People with previous COVID-19 were also 1.25 times as likely after dose 2 to experience an adverse reaction.

The findings held true across all vaccine types following dose one.

Of the female participants who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for instance, 82 percent who had COVID-19 previously experienced an adverse reaction after their first dose, compared to 59 percent of females who did not have prior COVID-19.

The only exception to the trend was among males who received a second AstraZeneca dose. The percentage of males who suffered an adverse reaction was higher, 33 percent to 24 percent, among those without a COVID-19 history.

Participants who had a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (confirmed with a positive test) experienced at least one adverse reaction more often after the 1st dose compared to participants who did not have prior COVID-19. This pattern was observed in both men and women and across vaccine brands,” Florence van Hunsel, an epidemiologist with the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb, and her co-authors wrote.

There were only slightly higher odds of the naturally immune suffering an adverse reaction following receipt of a Pfizer or Moderna booster, the researchers also found.

The researchers performed what’s known as a cohort event monitoring study, following 29,387 participants as they received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The participants live in a European country such as Belgium, France, or Slovakia.

Overall, three-quarters of the participants reported at least one adverse reaction, although some were minor such as injection site pain.

Adverse reactions described as serious were reported by 0.24 percent of people who received a first or second dose and 0.26 percent for people who received a booster. Different examples of serious reactions were not listed in the study.

Participants were only specifically asked to record a range of minor adverse reactions (ADRs). They could provide details of other reactions in free text form.

“The unsolicited events were manually assessed and coded, and the seriousness was classified based on international criteria,” researchers said.

The free text answers were not provided by researchers in the paper.

The authors note, ‘In this manuscript, the focus was not on serious ADRs and adverse events of special interest.’” Yet, in their highlights section they state, “The percentage of serious ADRs in the study is low for 1st and 2nd vaccination and booster.”

Dr. Joel Wallskog, co-chair of the group React19, which advocates for people who were injured by vaccines, told The Epoch Times: “It is intellectually dishonest to set out to study minor adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination then make conclusions about the frequency of serious adverse events. They also fail to provide the free text data.” He added that the paper showed “yet another study that is in my opinion, deficient by design.”

Ms. Hunsel did not respond to a request for comment.

She and other researchers listed limitations in the paper, including how they did not provide data broken down by country.

The paper was published by the journal Vaccine on March 6.

The study was funded by the European Medicines Agency and the Dutch government.

No authors declared conflicts of interest.

Some previous papers have also found that people with prior COVID-19 infection had more adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including a 2021 paper from French researchers. A U.S. study identified prior COVID-19 as a predictor of the severity of side effects.

Some other studies have determined COVID-19 vaccines confer little or no benefit to people with a history of infection, including those who had received a primary series.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends people who recovered from COVID-19 receive a COVID-19 vaccine, although a number of other health authorities have stopped recommending the shot for people who have prior COVID-19.

Another New Study

In another new paper, South Korean researchers outlined how they found people were more likely to report certain adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination than after receipt of another vaccine.

The reporting of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, or pericarditis, a related condition, was nearly 20 times as high among children as the reporting odds following receipt of all other vaccines, the researchers found.

The reporting odds were also much higher for multisystem inflammatory syndrome or Kawasaki disease among adolescent COVID-19 recipients.

Researchers analyzed reports made to VigiBase, which is run by the World Health Organization.

Based on our results, close monitoring for these rare but serious inflammatory reactions after COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents until definitive causal relationship can be established,” the researchers wrote.

The study was published by the Journal of Korean Medical Science in its March edition.

Limitations include VigiBase receiving reports of problems, with some reports going unconfirmed.

Funding came from the South Korean government. One author reported receiving grants from pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 05:00

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‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded…

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'Excess Mortality Skyrocketed': Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack 'Criminal' COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded experimental vaccines were hastily developed for a virus which primarily killed the old and fat (and those with other obvious comorbidities), and an aggressive, global campaign to coerce billions into injecting them ensued.

Then there were the lockdowns - with some countries (New Zealand, for example) building internment camps for those who tested positive for Covid-19, and others such as China welding entire apartment buildings shut to trap people inside.

It was an egregious and unnecessary response to a virus that, while highly virulent, was survivable by the vast majority of the general population.

Oh, and the vaccines, which governments are still pushing, didn't work as advertised to the point where health officials changed the definition of "vaccine" multiple times.

Tucker Carlson recently sat down with Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist and vocal critic of vaccines. The two had a wide-ranging discussion, which included vaccine safety and efficacy, excess mortality, demographic impacts of the virus, big pharma, and the professional price Kory has paid for speaking out.

Keep reading below, or if you have roughly 50 minutes, watch it in its entirety for free on X:

"Do we have any real sense of what the cost, the physical cost to the country and world has been of those vaccines?" Carlson asked, kicking off the interview.

"I do think we have some understanding of the cost. I mean, I think, you know, you're aware of the work of of Ed Dowd, who's put together a team and looked, analytically at a lot of the epidemiologic data," Kory replied. "I mean, time with that vaccination rollout is when all of the numbers started going sideways, the excess mortality started to skyrocket."

When asked "what kind of death toll are we looking at?", Kory responded "...in 2023 alone, in the first nine months, we had what's called an excess mortality of 158,000 Americans," adding "But this is in 2023. I mean, we've  had Omicron now for two years, which is a mild variant. Not that many go to the hospital."

'Safe and Effective'

Tucker also asked Kory why the people who claimed the vaccine were "safe and effective" aren't being held criminally liable for abetting the "killing of all these Americans," to which Kory replied: "It’s my kind of belief, looking back, that [safe and effective] was a predetermined conclusion. There was no data to support that, but it was agreed upon that it would be presented as safe and effective."

Carlson and Kory then discussed the different segments of the population that experienced vaccine side effects, with Kory noting an "explosion in dying in the youngest and healthiest sectors of society," adding "And why did the employed fare far worse than those that weren't? And this particularly white collar, white collar, more than gray collar, more than blue collar."

Kory also said that Big Pharma is 'terrified' of Vitamin D because it "threatens the disease model." As journalist The Vigilant Fox notes on X, "Vitamin D showed about a 60% effectiveness against the incidence of COVID-19 in randomized control trials," and "showed about 40-50% effectiveness in reducing the incidence of COVID-19 in observational studies."

Professional costs

Kory - while risking professional suicide by speaking out, has undoubtedly helped save countless lives by advocating for alternate treatments such as Ivermectin.

Kory shared his own experiences of job loss and censorship, highlighting the challenges of advocating for a more nuanced understanding of vaccine safety in an environment often resistant to dissenting voices.

"I wrote a book called The War on Ivermectin and the the genesis of that book," he said, adding "Not only is my expertise on Ivermectin and my vast clinical experience, but and I tell the story before, but I got an email, during this journey from a guy named William B Grant, who's a professor out in California, and he wrote to me this email just one day, my life was going totally sideways because our protocols focused on Ivermectin. I was using a lot in my practice, as were tens of thousands of doctors around the world, to really good benefits. And I was getting attacked, hit jobs in the media, and he wrote me this email on and he said, Dear Dr. Kory, what they're doing to Ivermectin, they've been doing to vitamin D for decades..."

"And it's got five tactics. And these are the five tactics that all industries employ when science emerges, that's inconvenient to their interests. And so I'm just going to give you an example. Ivermectin science was extremely inconvenient to the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. I mean, it threatened the vaccine campaign. It threatened vaccine hesitancy, which was public enemy number one. We know that, that everything, all the propaganda censorship was literally going after something called vaccine hesitancy."

Money makes the world go 'round

Carlson then hit on perhaps the most devious aspect of the relationship between drug companies and the medical establishment, and how special interests completely taint science to the point where public distrust of institutions has spiked in recent years.

"I think all of it starts at the level the medical journals," said Kory. "Because once you have something established in the medical journals as a, let's say, a proven fact or a generally accepted consensus, consensus comes out of the journals."

"I have dozens of rejection letters from investigators around the world who did good trials on ivermectin, tried to publish it. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you. And then the ones that do get in all purportedly prove that ivermectin didn't work," Kory continued.

"So and then when you look at the ones that actually got in and this is where like probably my biggest estrangement and why I don't recognize science and don't trust it anymore, is the trials that flew to publication in the top journals in the world were so brazenly manipulated and corrupted in the design and conduct in, many of us wrote about it. But they flew to publication, and then every time they were published, you saw these huge PR campaigns in the media. New York Times, Boston Globe, L.A. times, ivermectin doesn't work. Latest high quality, rigorous study says. I'm sitting here in my office watching these lies just ripple throughout the media sphere based on fraudulent studies published in the top journals. And that's that's that has changed. Now that's why I say I'm estranged and I don't know what to trust anymore."

Vaccine Injuries

Carlson asked Kory about his clinical experience with vaccine injuries.

"So how this is how I divide, this is just kind of my perception of vaccine injury is that when I use the term vaccine injury, I'm usually referring to what I call a single organ problem, like pericarditis, myocarditis, stroke, something like that. An autoimmune disease," he replied.

"What I specialize in my practice, is I treat patients with what we call a long Covid long vaxx. It's the same disease, just different triggers, right? One is triggered by Covid, the other one is triggered by the spike protein from the vaccine. Much more common is long vax. The only real differences between the two conditions is that the vaccinated are, on average, sicker and more disabled than the long Covids, with some pretty prominent exceptions to that."

Watch the entire interview above, and you can support Tucker Carlson's endeavors by joining the Tucker Carlson Network here...

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/14/2024 - 16:20

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