Vibe Shift
Sep 30, 2022
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Crypto Continues to Show Relative Strength
It was an eventful week in global macro (this is now the default opening line of every note), as consequential headlines rolled across the tape at a rapid clip. Among them:
Signs of slowing demand appeared in Apple’s revised agreement with suppliers, and early signs of potential deflation were on display in Nike’s surging inventories.Despite this, the Fed’s preferred inflation figure, PCE, came in extra hot for the month of August, consistent with the CPI print released earlier this month. Markets clearly already contemplated this number in asset prices following the CPI release, but it still left many market observers scratching their heads.We witnessed the second material intervention from a major central bank this week, as the Bank of England was forced to bid on long-duration UK treasuries such that large pensions did not go belly-up (more on this later).The Bank of Japan revealed that it spent nearly $20 billion in last week’s currency intervention. They stated that selling US treasuries was not yet an option on the table, but at the time of writing, the $JPY is trading about where it did before the central bank’s intervention.Nord Stream 2, a critical chess piece in the War in Ukraine, was destroyed, the proximate causes an...