Business

The bubble in sovereign bonds is looking dangerously close to popping.

And ironically, what could burst it is the very thing Central Banks have been pursuing aggressively for the last 9 years: inflation.

As I explain in my bestselling book The Everything Bubble, Treasury yields adjust to account for inflation. The relationship is not perfect as bonds are also priced based on economic activity. However, the fact remains, if the rate of inflation spikes, Treasury yields rise as well to account for this.

You can see this in the chart below:

Submitted by Rudy Havenstein

After years of seeing terrible market news and commentary, I’m pretty jaded, but when I saw the recent Marketwatch op-ed, “Janet Yellen’s true legacy is her focus on middle-class wages” (by Tim Mullaney), I thought such nonsense needed a reponse that went beyond 280 characters. (Half of Mullaney’s article is an anti-Trump rant, which is fine, and which I will ignore).

"If something is nonsense, you say it and say it loud."– Nassim Taleb

Everyone knows that tech stocks are - or at least until investors realized that tax reform is a fiasco for the tech sector, were - the darlings of the market, resulting in the biggest concentration of hedge fund holders with a record number of HFs holding the 5 FAANG stocks; at the same time far fewer are aware that while the tech space trades at less than 50% of its peak "dot com" valuations, it is the small and mid caps that have been the best performing, not to mention most overvalued sectors in recent years.

Confirming what many have suggested, the billionaire founder of the world's largest hedge fund, warns in his latest letter to watch out for the effects of tax reform on migration, the fiscal conditions of affected states and cities, and an increased polarity in America.

Birdgewater's Ray Dalio writes (via LinkedIn),

Stop us when you've heard this before... and you've heard it exactly two times in the last two quarter: both Bank of America and JPMorgan warning their revenue will be down double digits year over year because volatility is so low, and traders are so paralyzed, there is much less money to be made trading either flow or prop, or simply from collecting commissions.

Well, today marks the third time in the last three quarters when both JPMorgan and Bank of America both said - again - that there hasn’t been a rebound in the relentless slump in trading revenue.