Eurodollar University

After cutting 14,000 jobs back in October and denying there were more of them coming, Amazon confirmed yesterday there will be another 16,000 layoffs and made comments suggesting the company won’t be done even after then. These job cuts will only add to the worsening anxiety among American workers, who reminded everyone of those deep concerns in the latest plunge in consumer confidence. According to the most optimistic mea...

One of BlackRock’s private credit funds has just resurrected the cockroach concerns over debt woes in the space. By announcing that it will have to write down 19% of its net asset value, the fund also discloses more areas of cockroach concerns beyond those we had already become aware of. While at the same time, further reminding everyone how everything that people were worried about before they need to keep worrying about ...

An unprecedented shakeup at the very top of the Chinese military has shaken up the rest of the world. Xi Jinping didn’t just go after a longtime friend and ally, he has gone after everyone in what increasingly looks like a paranoid, Stalinist shakeup. But why? I’ve told you many times before about the economic pressure on China that has only intensified more recently. But that’s not the only thing. That’s where it starts, ...

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio is warning we shouldn’t be focused on trade wars, instead the real concern is capital wars. In those, Dalio says there will be a reduced appetite for owning US government debt or any US assets. Maybe even including American stocks. The comments were made in the context of recent geopolitical flashpoints in Venezuela and Greenland. As always, there’s a lot of noise surrounding this kind of top...

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A huge arctic blast, the weather wedge, has sent natural gas prices soaring in historic fashion. Some futures prices surged by a whopping 75% in just five days leading up to what people are calli...

The Japanese government bond market suffered a major meltdown this week that has shaken up a lot of people as they try to figure out what’s going on over there and how it might impact more than just government bonds as a class. One of the key factors that has emerged, however, is just how little selling it took to create these massive price swings. That has enormously profound implications.  

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The US housing market seemed like it was moving in the right direction recently, some better results people said were lower mortgage rates finally starting to work. But then reality dropped like a hammer today when the nation’s largest realtor group reported a massive 9.3% drop in pending home sales for December, biggest monthly decline since 2020. Stunned analysts are trying to figure out why lower rates aren’t stimulatin...

Macy’s is the latest retailer to admit to struggling in the current economic climate, closing several of what it calls fulfillment centers, basically warehouse facilities in Connecticut and Oklahoma and shedding thousands of those jobs. That comes in addition to even more store closings across the country. Why? Because only the wealthy are spending so the company wants to focus as much as possible on that segment. Macy’s i...

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Chinese retail sales just did something they’ve never done before outside of the lockdowns. At the same time, capital investment continues to legitimately crash, December was third month in a row...

What is going on with Freddie Mac? The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, which is Freddie’s official, has seen its stock utterly pummeled this past week, crashing by 25%. Since Freddie is one of the mortgage giants, this isn’t just some run of the mill equity. The story here appears to be tied up in a number of different angles, from GSE QE to its IPO, but the themes we keep coming back to are concerns over its cash ...

Every financial crisis generally takes place in three steps. And while there aren’t bright, clear lines of separation between them, each one does have unique characteristics that allow us to get a sense of where things stand in the process. That’s the thing, cycles are processes and as this one might go through all three steps, each one represents an escalation in that process. We’re in Stage 1, that’s just the start. Stag...

Today we’re going be unpacking the latest from closely watched indicators out of China: bank lending data, household credit, the movement of the yuan, and what a single real estate developer—China Vanke—tells us about debt and payments right now. Bank lending in 2025 fell to the lowest since 2018 largely because household lending utterly collapsed. Yes, it collapsed last year. 

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The Japanese yen keeps tumbling and as it does it is tanking the bond market over there. What we have is the first case of a currency value setting interest rates, with, of course, the Bank of Japan helplessly caught in the middle. That helplessness is reinforced by the fact Japan’s currency is being closely paralleled by South Korea’s and others across Asia. The tumbling won and yen have led to government calls for string...

JP Morgan missed on its earnings after failing to sell as many bonds as it was expecting for its customers. At the same time, Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO, he of cockroach fame, was forced to acknowledge how the labor market had softened before then going on to describe Goldilocks anyway. This is something that has come up in a couple of other sources already, not Goldilocks though that is the Fed’s official position, too. ...

Almost 40% of Canadian real estate funds have restricted access to investor funds, and that includes potential payouts. It’s a sign of how deep the housing bust in Canada has gotten to be, but also applies to the situation that’s spreading across global markets where it comes to the shadow bank matter. In fact, the UK’s house of lords urged the Bank of England to look into private credit risks “as a matter of urgency.”

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Call it GSE QE. The same day it was reported US housing construction fell to the lowest since 2020, the Trump administration announced it was going to direct the housing GSEs, Fannie mae and Freddie Mac, to buy $200 billion in mortgage securities. The idea is that those purchases will reduce mortgage borrowing costs and offer some aid to struggling households who might then consider buying a house previously out of their r...

US consumers have basically stopped using their credit cards. According to the Fed’s latest data, revolving consumer credit declined again, the third time over the last seven months. And one of those other three was basically zero. There has been a clear change in attitude which means Americans aren’t just feeling pessimistic, they’re taking action about it. That is why consumer revolving credit is a critical cyclical sign...

Blue Owl, a name we’ve gotten to know for all the wrong reasons, has been forced to come clean after getting sued by pretty much every class action securities lawyer in America, not only into admitting there was a wave of withdrawals but also promising to accommodate them over and above what it normally would. Not only does that further confirm the First stage of the credit cycle reverse, it actually sets up the second sta...

This is simply insane – new car sales among American households making $75k or less have crashed by 30% since 2019. Car prices soared. Incomes didn’t. They can’t afford a new car. But it’s not just the lowest incomes. Those making between $75k and $150k have bought 7% fewer cars than in 2019. This is a lot more than the K-shaped economy and to call it an affordability crisis seriously understates the problem. 

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