Wednesday 5, January 2022

It’s mostly fiscal

Shows how actually giving people money to spend makes a difference to the real economy. As opposed to the Fed encouraging banks to swap their holding of one government liability (Treasury bills) for another (reserves).

This has had a big impact on quit rates: .

Once workers start to switch jobs for higher pay, this thing is likely to get some momentum.

Wrap

The Fed is starting to feel a bit more hawkish. All the equity market gains of the last year are in long-duration ‘growth’ stocks. These have been hit hard, although so has the Russell 2000. Bonds are generally down: inflation again. The markets seem to be wondering whether a hike of a few basis points will fully counteract inflation rates of 6%, and therefore steep negative real rates. The Euro was up 25bp.

Service is being resumed

I am catching up with a work backlog. I hope to be able to provide more meaty content in the next week or so.

Python

I find that I download a lot of data in the form of xlsx and xls sheets. There are some handy python utilities to convert these formats to csv files, and some handly python libraries for manipulating csv files. Working in windows is sometimes a bit tricky, but the windows python launcher partially enables ‘shebang’ lines in scripts, which is handy.