Hi, I’m looking for someone who completes me and… wait, I’m being told that this isn’t an online dating profile. And that I should keep it professional. And put on a shirt.
Born and raised in Tampa, university at Georgetown, and with the exception of a year spent backpacking abroad I’ve been in New York for the past decade. Before joining Alphaville I spent a little more than two years as a reporter at Dow Jones Financial News covering investment banking, asset management, and private equity. Along the way I’ve written freelance pieces on a variety of other topics from behavioural psychology to Muay Thai, the latter also being a personal interest that involves frequently getting kicked in the shins (and torso, and head). When my guard is down I’ll admit to having attended journalism school.
Prior to becoming a journalist, I was an analyst for three years at the JPMorgan Private Bank. I worked for a team that had clients in Mexico and the Southern Cone, and I ran an internal newsletter for other analysts at the bank, overseeing a small staff.
My family is Cuban, and I was brought up in a Spanish-speaking household where everyone forgot about the earlier traumatic migration to a new country, keeping the same daily customs as if it had never happened. (Which was fine, except for the part where I didn’t know any English when I started kindergarten. That was a stressful three or four months until I caught up.)
I tend to write mostly about US macroeconomic issues, with daily excursions into other topics. Find me also on Tumblr and every now and again I’m one of the reporters interviewed on the Marketplace Weekly Wrap.
We’ll be starting at 2:25pm EST (6:25pm in London) for live coverage of the Bernanke presser. Same place as always. Read more
During the presser following last June’s FOMC meeting, Ben Bernanke cautioned that another round of QE shouldn’t be undertaken lightly because it may have “various costs and risks associated with it with respect to market functioning, with respect to financial stability, with respect to the exit process”.
The next round was launched in September, of course — after (though certainly not just because of) Fed staff economists presented an analysis to the FOMC concluding that there was “substantial capacity for additional purchases without disrupting market functioning”. Read more
There are a couple of points worth restating about how peripheral euro zone depositors might come to think about Cyprus’s deposit tax.
First, even if they come to view their deposits as more vulnerable in light of the Cypriot precedent, they’ll also know that the justification for a similar wealth tax is much weaker in countries whose banks aren’t suspect Russian stashes have more typical rosters of depositors. Although the language in Monday night’s Eurogroup statement was ambiguous, its mention of the importance of protecting insured depositors reinforces the point. Read more
Moody’s has completed its annual review of the US corporate cash situation, and here’s the headline news: Read more
Sometimes German doesn’t translate very well. Citi’s FX guru Steven Englander summarises the divergences between the intended and the interpreted as we leave a tumultuous weekend behind, and begin what could be a suspenseful couple of days:
The lessons that Germany and other northern euro zone countries thought would be learned from the Cyprus bailout: Read more
Tune in today at 9:25am EST (1:25pm in London) for a special edition of US Markets Live as we watch members of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations question current and former JPM managers about the Whale trade. We’ll keep going until either someone gets arrested, the hearings end, or we get bored.
The info on the hearings, a witness list, and the Senate’s 300+ page report can be found here. Read more
Tomorrow will be a difficult day for the witnesses called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
We haven’t made our way through all 300+ pages of the report, but we’ve searched around and come across some excerpt-worthy items. And we’ll have plenty more coverage tomorrow, when we host a special edition of US Markets Live starting at 9:25am EST. Read more
From a note Wednesday morning by ConvergEx (emphasis ours): Read more
Alan Blinder closes his op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Is there a way out? Here’s one thing that could help. As I have argued for some time, the Fed should reduce the interest rate it pays on the roughly $1.7 trillion of banks’ excess reserves. If it did so, banks would keep less cash on deposit at the Fed. The liberated funds would probably flow mainly into the money markets, but some would probably find their way into increased lending—which would give the economy a little boost. Read more
Last week continued a healthy discussion of the national income share that goes to capital versus labour. Or in layman’s terms, companies versus workers.
An earlier version of the discussion focused on whether technology or monopolistic behavior or some other non-cyclical reason was to blame. But the more recent iteration has been more about whether the trend has been exacerbated in the current recession-and-recovery period, contrasting the robustness of the corporate recovery against the sluggishness of jobs and income growth. Read more
A grateful hat tip to the FT’s Shahien Nasiripour for constructing and sending us the following basic spreadsheet.
It shows the discrepancy between the Fed’s estimates of how the largest banks would perform in its latest stress test scenario, versus how the banks themselves said they would fare (click to enlarge): Read more
That’s according to a note this morning by Birinyi Associates, which adds: Read more
How much do we care about the Dow’s crossing into record territory?
Enough to mention it in this post, but not so much that we’re going to strain our brain for anything original rather than just reproducing this par from last year, when the Dow crossed 13,000 (but which applies just as well today): Read more
The chart above from Credit Suisse Trading Strategy (pdf) shows the dollar value of quarterly net share changes in the S&P 500 index.
In simpler terms, this is a measure of corporate net buying, which is roughly: Read more
Via Bloomberg:
The American Securitization Forum, the leading trade association for the securitization industry, fell into turmoil last week when most of the board resigned in a dispute with the group’s executive director over governance and bonuses, according to six people familiar with the matter. … Read more
For those who have a life are less interested in messy details, the explanation for the dealmaking optimism of recent months goes something like this:
– Since roughly last summer (OMT), tail risks are perceived to be down. And despite Washington’s reverse midas touch, the private sector has shown signs of staying resilient, including a streak of a spookily consistent employment reports. Read more
Here’s the passage from the January FOMC minutes that is getting the most attention (emphasis ours, and we separated it into multiple pars for an easier read):
Several participants emphasized that the Committee should be prepared to vary the pace of asset purchases, either in response to changes in the economic outlook or as its evaluation of the efficacy and costs of such purchases evolved. For example, one participant argued that purchases should vary incrementally from meeting to meeting in response to incoming information about the economy. Read more
From a terrific post by Andy Harless:
Machismo is a type of commitment mechanism. Read more
Another excerpt from Janet Yellen’s speech today:
This possibility [of a skills mismatch between the skills of employees and the skills demanded by employers] and the unprecedented level and persistence of long-term unemployment in this recovery have prompted some to ask whether a significant share of unemployment since the recession is due to structural problems in labor markets and not simply a cyclical shortfall in aggregate demand. Read more
Janet Yellen notes that fiscal policy has been less of a tailwind in the latest recovery relative to the average of four previous US recoveries:
In the year following the end of the recession, discretionary fiscal policy at the federal, state, and local levels boosted growth at roughly the same pace as in past recoveries, as exhibit 3 indicates. But instead of contributing to growth thereafter, discretionary fiscal policy this time has actually acted to restrain the recovery. State and local governments were cutting spending and, in some cases, raising taxes for much of this period to deal with revenue shortfalls. At the federal level, policymakers have reduced purchases of goods and services, allowed stimulus-related spending to decline, and have put in place further policy actions to reduce deficits. … Read more
We’ll be resurrecting Alphachat and folding in the infrequently updated Alphaville podcast into a new format at the end of this week.
Well, “format” is probably too polite, since really it’s just going to be Lisa, Izzy, David and I having a chat about a bunch of stuff. Read more
There’s a lot I disagree with in Ross Eisenbrey’s NYT piece on high-skilled immigration, but I’ll start with this:
The bill’s authors, led by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, argue that America would benefit from letting more immigrants trained in science, technology, engineering and math work in the country, with the sponsorship of high-tech companies like Microsoft and I.B.M. … Read more
Lots of talk about the sequester Tuesday, with Obama’s speech and the CBO report assuming that most of the cuts (or compensating cuts of equal amount) will actually take effect.
Long story short: the cuts would add to further budget deficit reduction this year but also contribute to slower economic growth, naturally. Read more
Above is a chart from CreditSights of employment changes by sector since the start of the last recession. Education and health jobs account for roughly 15 per cent of the working labour force, and their number has grown by nearly 11 per cent. Only mining has posted a higher growth rate (17 per cent), but obviously off a much smaller base. Read more
This week on FT Alphaville…
- We made a video asking whether robots would take all the jobs. Read more
Political change in a democratic republic can be painfully slow, and thus even the improved chance of a meagre and incremental positive change is a good enough excuse to celebrate when it comes.
The two immigration proposals that emerged early this week from the Senate and from the President could well meet this standard, though it all depends how the politics shakes out. Read more
Another month, another payrolls number in the 150k range — except this one comes with big positive revisions to the prior two months. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly, but careful with this report, as it includes an updated population estimate in the household survey, and also the annual benchmarking in the establishment survey to reflect a new count of total jobs. Read the explanations at the bottom of the release for detail.
From the BLS: Read more
