Eurodollar University

What Is a Credit Cycle — and Where Are We in It? These are questions that keep coming up with everything that’s happening in…the credit market. Not just private credit and shadow banks, but thinking more broadly. Those are where all the downside signals are strongest and where all the excitement is right now. But credit cycles go beyond one sector’s garbage lending and cockroach production.  Eurod...

Bond yields rose sharply on Friday, but why? What you’ll hear is that inflation and a strong economy will force the Fed to hike. But that’s only half true – the possibility of the rate hike. All the rest of it, not so much. Both markets and American consumers agree wholeheartedly on all of it. In fact, on Friday, inflation expectations in Treasuries dropped to their lowest levels since early March...

We’re used to seeing this kind of thing out of the payroll reports, but I don’t think anyone really expected this. Red flags are up all over the May data, coming from all sides. Not the least of which is the context behind all the big problems in the numbers. When dollar stores complain that consumers are no longer able to buy food from dollar stores, you know everything is really out of whack.  E...

Europe is preparing its public for something it has tried to avoid for years: a trade fight with China. While all eyes are on Iran and oil, the energy shock is only adding more urgency to a brewing economic battle between two of the world’s biggest markets. According to recent reports, the European Commission has already held closed-door discussions about the next steps against Beijing. The global...

Blackstone’s flagship private credit fund just did something it had never done before. Investors tried to pull out about 10% of the fund’s shares. Blackstone finally and for the first time ever said, NO. The $79 billion Blackstone Private Credit Fund, known as B-CRED, told shareholders it would only allow 5% of shares to be redeemed. And this is where the story gets uncomfortable. Eurodollar Unive...

The private credit bust is no longer staying inside private credit. Investors are now pulling money out of a major Swiss private **equity** fund. As the guy once said, this is a big f-ing deal. For months, the story was supposed to be contained. A few private credit funds had redemption pressure. A few non-traded BDCs had to limit withdrawals. Some flighty investors supposedly misunderstood the li...

European banks are doing something that looks irrational. The European Central Bank is increasingly likely to raise its short-term policy rates again. Oil prices are still elevated. Energy costs are feeding into headline inflation. ECB officials keep coming on hawkish. And normally, if you believe short-term rates are going higher, the last thing you’re going to do is rush into government bonds. B...

Thanks to Monarch for partnering with me! Start your free trial and get 50% off your first year of total money clarity using my link https://monarchmoney.yt.link/k4lMFDZ or code euro50 for 50% Off Monarch Core tier. Oil is rebounding again and we have to ask whether it might be the final blow for an economy that was already on the edge to begin with. After all, in yesterday’s video, steve and I sh...

Did a recession strike the US economy starting in October? Not just the forgot how to grow kind we’ve been grappling with for the last several years, but the all-out, NBER-style, full-blown contraction. Take a look at the data and the charts in this video, let’s see what you think. And that data is coming from income series the NBER itself uses when it decides the recession question.  Eurodollar U...

Canada just “unexpectedly” fell into a technical recession. But the important part is not just that Canada contracted. The important part is that Canada’s contraction is lining up with the same weakness now spreading through France, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Mexico, and increasingly the rest of the global system. As one result, central bankers hawkishness is starting to seriously evaporate. Eurodol...

Private credit has a new problem, and this one is different. For months, the story has been retail investors pulling money from private credit funds. But now we have something else. A Swiss pension fund redeeming shares from a Vista private credit vehicle helped force that fund to limit withdrawals. And that's before asking the question: is software credit the new subprime mortgage? Eurodollar Uni...

JPMorgan just took the Goldilocks off the table. That is not a minor forecast change or some little tweak to a spreadsheet buried on page 47 of a Wall Street outlook. When one of the biggest banks in the world says “Goldilocks is leaving the building” and starts worrying about a **negative growth shock**, what they’re really saying is something big has changed.  Eurodollar University's Money &...

Home prices are now doing something they were not supposed to do. After years of being told that housing was poised to make a strong comeback and that prices were going to accelerate upward, the latest national housing data is saying something very different: the lowest price rate in fourteen years, going all the way back to the bottom of the Big Housing Bust in 2012. Eurodollar University's Money...

For the first time in this cycle, the money going out of major private credit vehicles has surpassed the money coming in. That is the headline, how private credit machine is now facing sustained investor outflows. Stage 2. And here’s the other big part of that – these net outflows are indeed forcing asset sales onto an industry that was never really built for this. That means we’re already deeper...

While rumors and reports swirl about a possible Iran deal, the clock is still ticking for an economy that’s way too close to the point of no return on the energy shock. In fact, for Europe, there is a nontrivial chance it’s already gone past. With the latest data out on Friday, the economic numbers for May so far got slammed. It increasingly looks like Europe may have already gone over the cliff w...

The dollar is rising again, and this time the pressure is showing up right across Asia. The Japanese yen is weak.  The South Korean won is tumbling.  The Indonesian rupiah is crashing. The Indian rupee keeps finding new ways to give officials fits. At the same time the dollar is rising against these Asian currencies, the very front of the U.S. dollar interest-rate market is doing something absolut...

Lowe’s had some more bad news about the American consumer. CEO Marvin Ellison said “This has been the most difficult housing market that I have faced in this business since the financial crisis.” Lowe’s is hardly alone. Walmart said higher income shoppers are still trading down while lower income Americans are, well, they’re running out of their tax refund money. And then there is Kroger.  Eurodol...

Treasury yields have finally made a sizable move upward. The 2-year Treasury has pushed to new multi-month highs. The 10-year got as high as 4.70%. And instantly, the usual question shows up: Is the bond market finally repricing real inflation risk? Or is this another hurricane warning where everyone looks at the headline number, panics for five minutes, and misses what the curve is actually sayin...

China’s downturn just produced a major hit and it has officials stumped. It was the kind of bad that confirms almost everything already showing up in China’s credit data, banking system, property market, and bond market. Retail sales nearly cracked. Worst month since the lockdowns. Fixed asset investment is crashing again. Yes, crashing. Industrial production, which had been one of the few remaini...

The Justice Department is now probing valuations at a BlackRock private credit fund. That sentence should stop everyone cold. Not because BlackRock is about to disappear. It isn’t. Not because one fund valuation probe means anyone has been proven to have done anything wrong. It doesn’t. A probe is not a conviction, and we need to be clear about that. But because the single biggest weakness in priv...

While the ECB and other central banks, maybe even the Fed, are likely to overreact to oil prices by raising their policy rates, suddenly that possibility isn’t so straightforward. Even in Europe where policymakers are the most aggressively hawkish, several officials have come forward expressing major doubts on the inflation narrative, focusing instead on what’s already going on with demand especia...

India is now doing what governments do when the dollar problem starts getting too close to the bone: it is looking for imports it can cut, restrict, tax, license, delay, or possibly even ban. And right at the top of that list sits gold and silver. That might sound like a metals story. It isn’t. Not entirely. It’s a dollar story, though with a key twist for precious metals.  Eurodollar University's...

Everyone is talking about the Trump-Xi summit as if this is going to be some decisive turning point for China, global trade, maybe even the whole world economy. And, sure, politically, it’s a huge deal. Markets love the idea of the two leaders in the same room because everyone wants to believe a handshake can undo tariffs, trade wars, supply chain chaos, and years of deteriorating relations. But t...

Two of the oldest political parties are in danger of being completely wiped out in the UK. Rate of change in the economy goes down, rate of change in politics goes way up. Both the Labor and Tories are on the ropes right now, especially labor after the latest local election results were a bloodbath for them. An entirely new UK system is right now emerging from the aftermath – but aftermath of what...

The stock market was going to boom either way. Payrolls could have been plus 200 or minus 200, indexes were going to soar no matter what. Either the economy is robust or the other would mean the Fed will be forced to cut a lot of rates. But what the jobs data actually showed, no one was looking for. Complete shock yet again. Sure, the payroll number did what the payroll number always does, it was...