Summer, and the lackadaisical torpidity that often accompanies it, are right around the corner.
In fact, this coming weekend marks the unofficial beginning of my least favorite season. I’m less than enthused.
There are no top-tier US macro releases on the docket this week, nor any second-tier updates for that matter. That’s probably for the best given that anyone unlucky (or junior) enough to be shackled to a terminal ahead of Memorial Day weekend will be mentally checked out anyway.
Housing market aficionados will get builder sentiment (seen at a hopeless 34 on Monday), pending home sales (seen posting a small advance on Tuesday) and new construction figures (starts seen falling 5% in government data due Thursday).
Other than that, the April FOMC minutes are the only thing on the calendar. That, and preliminary PMIs from S&P Global (I’ve stopped covering those because nobody trades them) and the final read on University of Michigan sentiment which, hitting as it will on the Friday before Memorial Day, will be a “If a tree falls in the forest but no one’s around to hear, does it make a sound?”-type of deal.
That’s not to say the new week doesn’t have the potential for fireworks. There’s a war goin’ outside, no man is safe from (to quote the late, great Prodigy). Well, I guess you’re safe from it if you’re in the upper-half of the “K,” but by now, I imagine even the well-off are losing their sense of humor about pump prices. I know I am.
My CLE 53 has a sibling: A GLC 43, which is more practical for trips, and filling it up yesterday left me almost as aggravated at Pete Hegseth as the father of a first-grader in Minab. (Too soon?)
“That it?” asked the gas station clerk, scanning the bar code on a blueberry RXBAR. “I also need three thousand on pump four,” I quipped. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a Trump voter by her half-empty Mountain Dew 20 oz and a name tag that says “Maisie.” Even she was sympathetic: “You’re tellin’ me, hun.”
Rates remain beholden to crude prices, which are in turn a function of war developments.
Note that the long-end ETF’s now back to the lows seen in October of 2023, when oversupply / sponsorship concerns forced Janet Yellen to incorporate placative language into successive QRAs.
In their latest weekly, BMO’s US rates team lamented “the realities of geopolitical negotiations conducted on social media.”
“It is less about marginal credibility, per se, and more a function of the outright contrasting headlines, with the administration asserting a fact only to have it contested shortly thereafter,” Ian Lyngen remarked. “The resulting environment has lowered conviction and created a collective reluctance to establish positions based on the fundamentals when any such effort could immediately prove folly via Trump’s next [TruthSocial] post.”
Although US equities were able to ignore the melee on their way to more than a dozen new record highs since the Iran war lows, the back up in Treasury yields and accompanying hawkish repricing in STIRs finally caught up to Wall Street late last week. Any additional upside for yields is going to be a problem.
The good news is, the last two times the long bond sported a five-handle (i.e., in May and July of last year), 30-year yields only lingered north of the Maginot Line for three sessions. And as Lyngen noted, the October 2023 episode mentioned above lasted less than two weeks.
Oh, and it’s worth noting that WHO over the weekend declared a global health emergency in connection with an Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The advisory implored the international community to coordinate, cooperate and step up “surveillance, prevention and response efforts.”
“There are significant uncertainties as to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time,” the WHO notice warned. “In addition, there is limited understanding of the epidemiological links with known or suspected cases.”
Asked on Saturday about the situation, and whether America’s prepared for another public health crisis, the nation’s foremost authority on infectious diseases said that although none of the available Ebola vaccines and antibody treatments are approved specifically for the Bundibugyo strain, the CDC’s exploring all options.
“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he told reporters. “Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.”
Ebola in Africa? The US Government no longer cares about international health concerns or vaccines (especially when primarily concerning nonwhites in cesspool countries).
And it would seem more and more difficult to come up with new salsa recipes for TACO Tuesday.
But, summer remains my favorite time of year in NM despite sage & pinon allergies and desert no-see-ums. Sell in May and tend to my planting and irrigation….
One of these mornings
You’re gonna rise up singing
Yes you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the sky
But ’til that morning
There ain’t nothin’ can harm you
With Daddy and Mommy standin’ by
Summertiiiime, and the livin’s easy
Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good-lookin’
So hush little baby, don’t you cry
You know what? Everyone needs to see this. That vibrato. That contra-alto. Summer is languid, and the inimitable Ella Fitzgerald lays it on better than anyone.
Also, I’ve never successfully embedded a video in the comments here. It’s an ongoing source of heartache. Maybe this will be the time. If it’s not, I’m sure you can tease the URL out of the gibberish.
Well shit, got nothing at all. Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2bigf337aU
Now could someone please explain to me how to embed videos in comments here?
I was distinctly detecting an undertone of melancholy in the writing until the end of CLE53 when it noted the likelihood of being ‘high on life’. So happy to see that even if for a fleeting moment penetrating a pervasive and obscuring melancholy that appears to be.
Well, that proved fleeting. But by and large, those Kitsch Register articles will have a slightly more upbeat tenor than the HR Monthly Letters. I’m not saying they’ll be “happy” — “Manhattan Nights” wasn’t exactly a happy one, although it was fun to write — but they won’t be as overtly dour.
I learned much about the drug world we all live in from that article. While I quit alcohol in not so dire straights as you I am often wondering about my mental state. The lack of a substance that acts like a depressant does affect ones life. Although it is overall a good change for me, it is a changed state nonetheless. To read something that teaches one about oneself is truly precious. The sliver of happiness at the end was encouraging to me that you are able to see life for what it is, wonderful.
Maybe I’m just old and grumpy, but it seems like the fuses are lit on a number of what could be global catastrophes; pandemics, major rivers drying up, quickening glacier melt, toxic spewing fires, war crime ridden conflicts and death dealing heat waves – to name just a few.
Yes, 3D – but there may be a good chance those of us of a certain age may not live long enough to see most of the slow festering disasters blossom into catastrophes great enough to affect us too significantly. We can hope…
[easy enough for the childless minority of us to say]
Some chear all this along as they are hoping for the Rapture while alive on this earth. In the tale of the Rapture the ‘true believers’ you know the ones that burn their enemies at the stake will go to heaven. The disbelivers and they ones being burned at the stake well not so fast, they go to hell to burn in eternal fire. Oh well what a life burning people at the stake to prove you are a true believer. And I thougth Christianity was all about love, healing the sick and feeding the poor, silly me.
So, you’re taking a trip? Can’t wait to hear all about it! 🙂
Very pleased with my decision to buy a plug in hybrid that can be on all electric for forty miles. I’m sure it’s not up to H standards but it’s luxurious enough for this simpleton.
“Sell in May and go away”.
Go away… Specifically, go swimming with the pigs down in the Bahamas.
Just be careful feeding them, apparently they’ll take your finger off if you’re not mindful.
Mr H., I got the sense that you were in your happy place writing this one. I was smiling from the very beginning of the article – with the picture and the happy-go-lucky title portending doom and gloom – until the last paragraph, where you had me laughing out loud. Thanks very much for bringing this to us in our time of need.