Thursday, January 9th, is a day of mourning for President Jimmy Carter, our 39th President, who passed away at 100 years old on December 29th, 2024.

I was lucky enough in college to attend the inauguration of President Carter in January 1977. It was a bitterly chilly day but sunny, and one…

Option-Adjusted Spread (OAS) is a crucial metric used in active management of fixed income portfolios to provide insights into the yield difference between a bond and a risk-free benchmark, adjusted for any embedded options. These spreads are particularly important for understanding the true…

Fourth Quarter 2024 – The Trump Yield Rally

Lighter than expected income, spending, and inflation. While personal income and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) grew a bit more slowly than expected in November, but were still solid, the most important data in today’s release were PCE (and core PCE) inflation data that were a bit…

As expected, the Fed cut its target for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points for the third time this year, from 4.5%–4.75% to 4.25%–4.5%. All Committee members but one, President Hammack of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, in her first FOMC meeting, voted to cut the rate. The…

Going into its last meeting of the year, on December 17th and 18th, the FOMC now has a new jobs report, shown below; and the number of jobs created in November is 227,000, which exceeded expectations. On the downside, the data for September and October were revised up slightly as well. The…

CPI inflation up as expected, with declines having leveled off.

The overall November Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 0.3 percent for the month, as did the core CPI (removing the volatile food and energy components). The 12-month trend rate for the overall CPI ticked higher to 2.7…

The weather/strike rebound in jobs as expected.