Business

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,

it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,…”

Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

I'm back -- Chris

This week’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee is being set up in the financial media as a contest between the anti-inflation tendency led by Fed Chair Janet Yellen and the pro-growth forces led by President Donald Trump.  Would that it were so.  

European stocks declined for first session in five ahead of Wednesday's Dutch elections, debt ceiling expiration and the conclusion of the Fed's 2-day meeting where it is expected to raise rates by 25 bps. Tightening concerns emerged, also dragging down Asian shares and S&P futures, while the dollar continued its rise for a second day. Crude oil has ended its six-day drop. The pound tumbled 0.8% to the lowest since mid-January in a delayed reaction after Theresa May won permission to trigger the country’s departure from the EU.

The Bank of England's new deputy governor of markets and banking, Charlotte Hogg, has resigned after less than five week in her post, after an MP report concluded she "fell short of the very high standards required" for the position as a result of failing to disclose that her brother works at Barclays, a bank which the BOE regulates.

Alarm bells are starting to ring across multiple asset classes as we approach The Fed's first double-rate-hike-in-3-months since 2006. The most concerning canary in the coalmine is US credit markets...

After a bigly run-up from the Feb 2016 lows - on the heels of unprecedented central bank cooperation - IG bonds began to break bad shortly after Trump's election and HY bonds began to collapse as The Fed stepped up its jawboning and after Trump's address to Congress...

Today’s chart plots data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) to show America’s changing energy mix, along with their projected mix for 2030.

Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins points out that it shows the total amount of energy used each year, along with energy use per capita. It then breaks down each year’s energy supply by source, which provides another way for us to visualize the decline of coal use, the resurgence in natural gas, and the rise of renewable energy.