Data Diary

A week of other commitments that have deprived me of this blogs warm embrace…and the US market is still playing to the same script – USD lower, equities higher. Still looks like a final thrust higher to my jaundiced eyes, which would be consistent I guess with the Fed spending its remaining QE pennies. Divergences are [...]

From ICAP’s bulk shipping first quarter report: …most notable was the massive change in China’s imports of iron ore between January and February which collapsed from 68 Mt to 48 Mt and when this was combined with the 10 Mt fall in the country’s coal imports also in February the resulting 30 Mt drop exceeds [...]

We all suffer from bias – it’s what makes interpreting the subtext fun. So how to read the RBA’s latest commodity price release (here)? Preliminary estimates for March indicate that the index rose by 0.6 per cent (on a monthly average basis) in SDR terms, after rising by 1.4 per cent in February (revised). The largest [...]

First, our thoughts are with all those impacted by the Japanese earthquake – the seeming too-common occurrence of disasters does nothing to diminish their import. The world was already awash with rising risks but this new disaster is likely to become a seminal event in changing people’s attitudes to risk. The magnitude and breadth of [...]

Another month rolls by (Feb report here) and commodities still power on – the RBA published it’s monthly commodity index (here): The prices of Australia’s basket of commodity exports climbed higher against all comers. Preliminary estimates for February indicate that the index rose by 2.2 per cent (on a monthly average basis) in SDR terms, [...]

Global industrial production is set to climb again – as it waddles after those cardigan wearing purchasing managers: The US has been leading the way – from the JP Morgan Global PMI Report report (here) The US PMI rose to an eighty-month high in January, while its counterpart in the Eurozone hit a nine-month peak. [...]

Latest Commitments of Traders reports (here) confirm that deeper pocketed speculators continue to exit their gold positions: Managed money longs have declined through the July 2009 lows and are threatening to revisit levels last seen in March 2009.  (Note the boxed area in the charts reflects the period since gold bottomed in October 2008.) And [...]

That is the view of Larry Meyer, former Fed Governor, now simply ‘well connected’. In this interview, with David Einhorn as the foil, he couldn’t be clearer…commodity prices are being bid up by the ‘booming’ economies of China and Asia that have mistakenly adopted US monetary policy. That higher commodity prices may actually reduce disposable [...]

Uncle Scrooge is scratching his head about what to think about China. On the one hand, we have the (glacially slow to market) OECD leading indicators that have been signalling a slowdown in China for some time now (see here – next update due 13Dec10).  Albert Edwards notes (via Alphaville here) that with these indicators in [...]

Let’s be clear – the hedge fund community remains net short Australian banks and some of our major resource stocks. So it’s interesting to hear the rationale for the short China trade from one of the better known hedge fund managers (click here to view the CNN interview with Jim Chanos). It’s an argument that [...]