Michael Ashton | TalkMarkets | Page 2
Inflation Products and Markets Expert
Contributor's Links: E-piphany What’s Wrong With Money?
On Bloomberg TV his audiences know him as the “Inflation Guy.” In the inflation markets he is known as a pioneer, having traded the very first interbank US inflation swaps and having been the sole market maker for the CPI futures contract. He is considered as the ...more

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Higher Rates’ Impact On Levered Strategies
Higher interest rates leads to lower hedge fund risk-adjusted returns, directly and significantly.
What Happens If CPI Isn’t Released?
In the past, some data releases of federal agencies have been delayed (or their quality impacted), and if the delay was long enough then it could affect TIPS.
Union Power And Inflation
The longer inflation stays higher, the more power unions have. And the more power unions have, the more momentum inflation has.
Asset Class Correlations Convict Central Bank Activism
Now that inflation has been above 2.5% for 3 years, correlations between stocks and bonds have returned to what they were back when inflation last mattered to investors: the 1965-2000 period.
Home Price Futures Curve Still Looks Weird
Recently, concern about the acceleration in shelter inflation that happened between 2021 and 2023 has been dampened somewhat.
Three Pertinent Inflation Observations
The BLS needs to disentangle the cost of the medical care that we are buying indirectly from the cost of the embedded insurance products.
How The Fed Saved Structured Note Issuance
A classic structured note is typically designed so that the buyer is guaranteed to get his money back, plus the possibility of some more-attractive payout.
Inflation Volatility Tells Us This Is Probably Not Over
The importance of inflation volatility is that it operates on inflation expectations in a very different way than the inflation level does.
Enough With Interest Rates Already
For at least 40 years, the level of real policy rates has had no discernable effect on changes in the level of inflation. And yet, the current central bank dogma is that rates are the only thing that matters.
CPI Swaps Improving? Not As Significant As You Think
Since early 2022, just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 10y US CPI swaps have fallen from about 3.15% to around 2.50%.
Is Inflation Dead… Again?
Prices of short-dated inflation swaps in the interbank market suggest that NSA headline inflation is going to rise less than 0.9% for the entire balance of 2023 (a 1.45% annualized rate).
Social Security Solvency, Solved
Incremental change is digestible, and the trick is merely to make it repeatable. This is how long-lived civilizations act.
Food Inflation Served Hot And Cold
Saturating the economy with bank reserves means that today’s tightening is fundamentally different from the tightening of yesteryear, which was a money phenomenon and not a rates phenomenon.
No Need To Rob Peter To Pay Paul
The good news is that policymakers have stopped pretending that prices will go back down to the pre-pandemic levels.
Who’s Afraid Of De-Dollarization?
Whether the US economic system remains a dominant one is…fortunately or unfortunately…in our hands, not in the hands of foreign state actors.
The Phillips Curve Is Still Working Just Fine
The Phillips Curve is a very simple idea and a very powerful model. It simply says that when labor is in short supply, its price goes up.
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