Jeffrey P. Snider
@JeffSnider_EDU
Host Eurodollar University channel. Monetary science reborn. Putting central banks where they belong.
920 Following 140.4K Followers
The most important financial system on earth has nobody in charge of it. Not by accident. By choice.
Almost every global transaction runs on dollars created offshore, outside the US. China and the world depend on them.
So who is responsible for that system? Nobody. The Fed says its mandate stops at the border.
In 2008, when the offshore market broke down in London, Fed officials called it a Bank of England problem. Not ours.
Back in the 1960s, officials game-planned who would step in if it broke. Then they decided it did not matter.
So no one took the job. 2008 proved that a disaster. More than a decade later, nothing has changed.
We still run the world's reserve currency with no one accountable for it.
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Everyone points to investment grade spreads near record lows and says credit is fine. That is the trap.
Credit cycles never hit everyone at once. The calm at the top hides the stress underneath.
Big investment grade names have cash and steady buyers. Their spreads stay tight no matter what.
But look down the ladder. Triple-C spreads are blowing out. The weakest borrowers are losing access first.
That is not panic. It is investors getting selective. They still want credit, just not from anyone who needs constant refinancing to survive.
And that is how credit cycles begin. Not everything collapsing at once, but lenders quietly walking away from the borrowers who cannot live without them.
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The Fed has a story: labor market resilient, oil prices rising, so inflation risk is back on the table.
There is just one problem.
That story only holds if you look at one number and ignore everything else.
The official unemployment rate says fine. The establishment survey, housing, and consumer sentiment all say something very different.
An entire year with essentially no job growth does not scream resilient.
So when oil prices rise on top of a labor market that is actually fragile, that is not the setup for inflation. It is the setup for demand destruction.
Two readings of the same economy. One is a theory. One is showing up in the data.
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The people who get the most out of October have three things in common. They are responsible for real capital, they take the decisions seriously, and they arrive with a specific problem rather than a general interest in macro.
If that is you, four days in a room of thirty nine others like it is worth the trip.
October 9 to 12, West Palm Beach:
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The most trusted rule in markets is don't fight the Fed. It is a myth, and the bond market has been betting against it for years.
Everyone cites 2013 as proof the Fed is in control. The taper tantrum. Rates spiked when the Fed hinted it would stop buying bonds.
But look closer. Rates rose only because the market briefly agreed with the Fed, more growth ahead.
Then the Fed actually started tapering. If the Fed set rates, bonds should have fallen. They rose instead.
The market had rejected the whole thesis. It was never reacting to the Fed. It was disagreeing with it.
The studies agree. Dozens of them found QE moves rates about half a point for every 10 percent of GDP spent. Almost nothing.
The market sets interest rates. Not the Fed.
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brilliant!!
After helping more than 3,000 families build a real retirement plan, I've noticed something almost every financial advisor gets backwards.
They start by asking how much money you've saved. I don't. When someone sits across from me and asks if they're really ready to retire, I ask a completely different question.
Can every dollar you've accumulated actually do the job it's supposed to do?
Here's what most people miss. Every dollar can only have one job. A dollar producing income can't also be your emergency fund.
A dollar you're setting aside for your kids can't also cover your lifestyle next year.
Once you understand that, you start to see why people who did everything right still run into trouble a few years into retirement.
Every solid retirement plan has to solve four levels, in order. Lifestyle first: can your assets replace your paycheck?
Then liquidity: can your plan survive real life when the roof leaks or the grandkids need help?
Then long-term care: can you survive a health crisis without wrecking everything else?
Only after you've solved those three do we get to talk about legacy.
Skip one of these, and it usually doesn't show up right away. It shows up years into retirement, right when you can't go back and earn the money again.
On Wednesday, September 10th at 8pm Eastern, I'm walking through this live, including how the Passive Income Machine turns the income you're earning right now into $100K or more in annual cash flow in 10 years or less.
Bring your questions, because you can ask me anything on the call.
Register for the live webinar here:
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Most of what I do reaches people through a screen. Daily research, videos, the same work every day.
Once a year it doesn't. Four days in West Palm Beach with forty people, in a room where I actually know who I am talking to.
October 9 to 12:
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The October room is not the introduction.
It assumes you already know the difference between money and credit, that you have read this work long enough to disagree with parts of it, and that you are not looking for someone to hand you a position.
If you are earlier than that, the research service is a better place to start and costs a great deal less. That is not a sales technique, it is just true.
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The yield curve inverted, and no recession was declared, so people say the curve broke.
Inversion was never a countdown clock to a committee declaring a recession. The shape of the curve tells you something about monetary and rate conditions. Treating it as a binary recession indicator throws away most of the information in it.
More of this, in person, in October:
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"I had pretty high expectations. They were certainly met and exceeded."
From last October. High expectations is the right way to arrive and the hardest version of the room to satisfy, because people who have read this work for years already know what the baseline is.
Four days, forty people, and the only one I run all year.
October 9 to 12:
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Four days is a strange length for an event. Long enough to be inconvenient, short enough that you can't waste any of it.
That is deliberate. It is why the one I run each year is four days rather than one.
October 9 to 12, West Palm Beach:
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Everything I teach comes from public data. No terminal, no black box, nothing you need a subscription to pull.
The barrier was never access. It is knowing which parts matter right now and in what order to read them.
That is what my annual live event is for. Four days, forty people, October 9 to 12:
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"It fundamentally changed the way I look at investing and at macro in general."
That's from somebody who spent four days with me in West Palm Beach last October, working through how to read the monetary system from the plumbing up.
I run it once a year, forty people. There's a minute of last year's room talking about it on the page, if you want a sense of it before this October's.
October 9 to 12:
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Forty seats at my October event isn't a marketing number.
Part of the weekend happens at my house, and a house puts a real ceiling on things.
West Palm Beach, October 9 to 12:
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new interview with @GeorgeGammon just dropped
Amazon just tried to sell bonds to fund its AI buildout.
Strong balance sheet. Investment grade. Access to almost every source of capital on earth.
Demand still came in far below normal.
Orders peaked near 62 billion, then shrank to about 41 billion after banks cut the spread. That is only 1.6 times the offering, when the average this year has been closer to 4 times.
Amazon had to pay up too, an extra 18 to 21 basis points on its longest bonds just to get investors to show up.
This is not a story about Amazon being distressed. It is a story about where the same pressure hitting private credit is starting to show up in elite public borrowers.
The line everyone draws between these two credit markets is a lot thinner than it looks.
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China's economy just confirmed what the data has been warning for months.
Retail sales. Worst month since the lockdowns. Fixed asset investment crashing. Housing prices falling for the 12th straight month.
Ugly in every direction.
But here's what nobody's talking about.
Two months ago, China quietly revised retail sales numbers. The alarming downturn — gone. Just like that.
Those revisions just got reversed. The downturn is back. April made it worse.
The question isn't how bad is China's economy. The question is who were those revisions for.
The timing was convenient. They appeared right as Party officials were projecting confidence at the National People's Congress. Defending growth targets that already looked unrealistic.
Now the real data is catching up.
Property bust still busting. Banking crisis picking up speed. Households won't borrow. Corporations won't act.
China was fragile before the energy shock even started.
The data just confirmed it.
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