The Richmond Fed Manufacturing Survey has now risen for 7 straight months, soaring to 22 in March - the highest since April 2010.
This smashed expectations by over six standard deviations as new orders, employees, workweek, and wages all soared.
Given the stagnation of industrial production, there must be something very special in Richmond...
AS a result of countless failures by central banks to normalize monetary policy over the past 7 years, the market - especially bonds and rates - has become openly cynical and outright skeptical regarding the possibility of a successful renormalization of policy by global central banks. After all, Japan has been trying to do that for over 30 years and has yet to succeed; the ECB hiked in 2011 resulting in near collapse of the Eurozone.
Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,
Like an old vinyl record with a well-worn groove, the needle skipping merrily back to the same track over and over again, we repeat: Today's markets are dangerously overpriced.
The Fed's most recurring lament over the past 8 years, ever since the Financial crisis, is that there has been no measurable inflation in the US economy when using such conventional indicators as CPI, even though according to recent measurements by PriceStats real inflation, not the BLS' seasonally-adjusted, goalseeked and politically convenient mutant, is now running at a blistering 3.6%, the highest in five years.
There has been no shortage of sellside reactions to last week's Fed rate hike, which have run the gamut from congratulatory as per BofA and Credit Suisse, to the outright critical, as we showed last week in a note from Goldman Sachs, RBC and SocGen, all of whom accused the Fed of either misleading the market, or soon being being forced to double down on its hawkish message as a result of the dramatic easing in financial conditions as a result of a rate hike.