We all know public pensions are often underfunded, or dependent on outsized stock market gains, which means the increases in local government taxes and fees are just getting started...
Today's post-Christmas rally is brought to you not by the PPT, but by pensions funds which waited until the very last minute to buy up to $64 billion in stocks as part of their quarter-end rebalancing.
Prepare for another potential "seismic bout of volatility" - US corporate pensions may need to boost their equity portfolios by as much as $64 billion into year-end...
All that inherently over-priced-in optimism that sparked a notable divergence between slumping 'hard' real economic data and soaring 'soft' survey data is slowly getting sucked out of participants' narratives.
Hope-filled 'soft' survey data is starting to collapse back to the reality of US 'real' economic data and Empire Fed's plunge from 23.3 to 10.9 in December is the latest example.