I believe 2018 will be the year inflation arrives.
The reason, as I’ve noted throughout mid-2017, is that multiple Central Banks, particularly the European Central Bank (ECB), Bank of Japan (BoJ) and Swiss National Bank (SNB) have maintained emergency levels of QE and money printing, despite the fact that globally the economy is performing relatively well.
"How do you know when an asset price rise has turned into a bubble?" That's the rhetorical question Albert Edwards leads his today's Global Strategy Weekly note, and responds that in the non- virtual world, valuation is often a good starting point.
Authored by Daniel Nevins via FFWiley.com,
In September, we proposed a theory of the Fed and suggested that the FOMC will soon worry mostly about financial imbalances without much concern for recession risks. We reached that conclusion by simply weighing the reputational pitfalls faced by the economists on the committee, but now we’ll add more meat to our argument, using financial flows data released last week.
Despite a resurgence in positve surprises in hard macro data, PMIs (and soft survey data) has been fading in recent months and Markit's preliminary December showed a notable divergence in the US economy as Manufacturing rebounded to 2017 highs and Servces slumped to 15-month lows.
Back in May when the Chinese domination over Bitcoin was ending, we predicted that it would shift over to Japan, specifically, we said that "just as the Chinese bubble frenzy in bitcoin is fading, it may be replaced with a new one, in which thousands of Mrs. Watanabe traders shift their attention away from the FX market and toward digital currencies" and added that "If the transition is seamless, there is no telling just how far this particular bubble can grow."