CPI

Today the Bank of England releases its rate decision, minutes and quarterly inflation report (QIR) all at 1200BST with the QIR press conference to be held by Governor Carney at 1245BST. Given the volume of information on offer, the release is likely to be met with volatility.

• All surveyed analysts expect the Bank of England to keep monetary policy unchanged, with the bank rate at 0.5% and the Asset Purchase Facility at GBP 375bln

• Focus expected to instead by on minutes and Quarterly Inflation Report (QIR) release with minutes expected to show a 7-2 vote split on keeping rates on hold

• QIR will be analysed to see if it compares or contrasts to recent hawkish BoE rhetoric

Wondering why the drop-out rate from college is so high? One reason could be that a stunning 65% of students avoided buying textbooks due to the cost. As NBCNews reports, textbook prices have risen over three times the rate of inflation from January 1977 to June 2015, a 1,041 percent increase - dwarfing the government's official CPI data. Just as government-subsidized healthcare has 'enabled' dramatic rises in the costs of drugs so government-subsidized education has sparked hyperinflation-esque pricing in college textbooks

Japan's all important real wages, even those including bonuses and special payments, once again failed to keep up with inflation, and in June crashed by a whopping 2.9% reflecting a 0.5% yoy increase in the CPI excluding imputed rent. As the chart below shows, there has now been 24 consecutive months without a single Y/Y monthly increase in real wages. What's worse is that when one adjusts the inflationary surge from the consumption tax hike last April, which has now been fully anniversaried and is no longer part of the base effect, this was the largest decline in Japan's real wages since December 2009, or the biggest monthly plunge in 6 years!

Chinese stocks are opening flat to marginally higher - still lower from Friday's close - despite the government unleashing yet more 'measures' in the name of stability. Having banned 5 accounts - reportedly including Fed-favorite Citadel - China is blaming excess market volatility on short-term short-sellers and has put in place curbs on short-selling that force traders to hold for at least one day. On the bright side, margin traders reduced exposure for the seventh day in a row, reducing outstanding balances to 5-month lows.. which leaves the median China stock trading at a remarkable 61x reported earnings (compared with 12x in Hong Kong).

You cannot understand gold if you think it goes up and down, that the dollar is the measure of gold. Gold does not necessarily go up with interest, inflation, or commodities. Indeed, it does not go anywhere. It's the dollar going places (mostly down).

It is absolutely normal for employers to completely miss the signs of impending doom. The 2007 extreme occurred just before the carnage of mass layoffs that was to begin a couple of months later. Employers were still clueless that the end of the housing bubble would have devastating effects. If they were clueless then, they are in an advanced state of delirium and delusion now. The devastating 1973-74 bear market, which cut the value of stocks by 50%, was in its early stages. This was an early example of employers being late to the funeral. Similar employer hoarding of workers has been associated with bubbles in the more recent past and has led to massive retrenchment, usually within 18 months or so.

Regardless of where one thinks the dollar is going in the long-term, here is a discussion of where it will likely go in the short-term.  

Our monetary politburo is driving the US economy in the wrong direction. That is, toward dis-employment of its true, wealth-creating economic resources - human labor, entrepreneurial talent and market driven gains in economic factor efficiency. Contrary to this week’s self-congratulatory statement, all is not well and its not getting weller.

The so-called “trustees” of the social security system issued their annual report last week and the stenographers of the financial press dutifully reported that the day of reckoning when the trust funds run dry has been put off another year - until 2034. So take a breath and kick the can. That’s five Presidential elections away!

...Except that is not what the report really says.

While the overall unemployment rate for the Eurozone also unchanged at 11.1%, it was renewed concern about what is going on in Italy, where unemployment rose from 12.5% to 12.7%, while Italy's youth unemployment rate, which surprisingly jumped by nearly 2% to 44.2%, a record level.  As Bloomberg put it, "Italy’s jobless rate unexpectedly rose in June as businesses continue to dismiss workers amid concerns that the country’s exit from recession may not be sustainable."

In a repeat of Thursday's action, Chinese stocks which had opened about 1% lower, remained underwater for most of the session before attempting a feeble bounce which took the Shanghai Composite fractionally into the green, before the now traditional last hour action which this time failed to maintain the upward momentum and the last day of the month saw a surge in volume which dragged the market to its lows before closing roughly where it opened, -1.13% lower.  This caps the worst month for Chinese stocks since since August 2009, as the government struggles to rekindle investor interest amid a $3.5 trillion rout, one which has sent the Shanghai market lower by 15% - the biggest loss among 93 global benchmark gauges tracked by Bloomberg.

We start off the overnight wrap up with the usual place, China, where in a mirror image of Wednesday's action, stocks once again started off uneventful, then gradually rose in the afternoon session and meandered near unchanged territory until the last half hour, when out of the blue they tumbled to close near the day's low, some 2.2% below yesterday's closing level.  What caused it?  One possible catalyst came from Reuters which reported that that Chinese banks were investigating their exposure to the stock market via wealth management products and loans backed by stock as collateral. 

Here is the paradox as succinctly summarized by Deutsche Bank, which notes that the current -29% year-over-year drop in the CRB index implies YoY headline CPI inflation falling from 0.1% to -0.9% over the next couple of months, or just in time for the September or December FOMC meetings both proposed as the "lift off" date. This would be the largest year-over-year drop since September 2009 (-1.3%) and one of the lowest prints in modern history.

It seems China's efforts to stabilize their economy stock market knows no bounds - nowhere better exemplified than the 5% spike in an hour last night after injecting $100bn into the sovereign (rescue) fund - and western observers applaud the efforts as if they are costlessly saving the world. However, there are costs to all this leveraged asset bubble creation (and maintenance) and, as China People's Daily reports, nowhere is that more evident than the surging price of pork (on if China's main CPI components). As Deutsche Bank warns, in the past 15 years, the PBoC has never cut interest rates when inflation was picking up (whether driven by food or more broad-based); so the fate of an 'easy money' inspired stock market bubble remains in the hands hoofs of pigs as the policy stance will be forced to turn from loosening to neutral in Q4 as inflation rises.