CRB

Overview of the price action in various currencies, S&P 500, Treasuries and the CRB Index

A look at key events and data in the week ahead.  

Overview of the price action in the forward exchange market and a look ahead.  

Here are the best and worst performing assets broken down by the three key time periods as we leave the first half of 2013 (it's not been a good year for wheat).

Economist John Maynard Keynes described the effects of inflation citing Vladimir Ilyich Lenin this way: “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.  As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” This is why governments love inflation so much and hate gold.

As we noted on the last day of March, April was supposed to be the best month for stocks, with an average return since 1950 of over 2%. It wasn't.

Prak central bank balance sheets are still ahead.  Interest rate increases are still several quarters out.  Austerity has peaked.  The output gap has peaked.    What does this mean in the week ahead ?  

We highlighted the CRB/BLS Spot Foodstuffs Index last week. It’s continuing to rise but still remains lower year-on-year at this point.  The question is whether this is the start of a broadly-based period of food price inflation?

Overview of the events and data that will be of interest to investors. 

There are two major concerns that everyone should be concerned about that we see taking this sell-off further and faster than anyone else expects...

Tomorrow we prepare for a “new” Fed.  It looks a lot like the old Fed, but one can hope. In the meantime we wonder if QE is worth it?  Does it do what it is “supposed” to do?  No.  We don’t think it has done much for jobs or inflation or housing.  We look at the pre QE data and the post QE data and we are underwhelmed. But what real evidence is there that QE is helping the economy?  Would we be the same without it?  Better even?  I am told no, but I am told a lot of things that turn out not to be true.  If it was clear that QE was really helping the economy, I wouldn’t be wondering why we do it. But is there any harm to QE?  That is the other side of the coin.  Ask any person from an Emerging Market whether QE is harmful and you will likely get a very different answer than the one Ben has given.

Curious which were the best and worst performing asset classes for the month of October? Deutsche Bank explains.

Commodities are no longer on investors’ radar screens. Various signals, however, are pointing to a new rally within the commodities super cycle.

The volatility of recent weeks is but a mere small taste of the volatility in store for all markets in the coming months and years. The global debt crisis is likely to continue for the rest of the decade as politicians and central bankers have merely delayed the day of reckoning. They have ensured that when the day of reckoning comes it will be even more painful and costly then it would have been previously.