Correspondent Blog

Team Transitory Stands Down It seems you can retire the word transitory from your vocabulary, or at least from the Fed playbook, as Fed Chair Powell declared yesterday in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee.  Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen were there as required by the CARES Act to update the committee on the…

Markets Reconsider Worst Case Virus Scenario Investors are reconsidering the worst case virus scenario from the new South African variant and that has Treasuries giving back some of their gains from Friday and stocks looking to recapture some  of the losses suffered that day. South African health experts, including the doctor who first went public…

Thanksgiving Week Arrives with Plenty on the Plate With the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, and plenty of people taking the whole week off, it still holds plenty of intrigue. It’s just a matter of who will be around to react to it?  The first matter of business will be whether the Build Back Better Bill…

Are Accelerating Wage Gains the Next Inflation Risk? Team Transitory at the Fed continues to doggedly persist in the labeling of supply-constrained price increases as temporary; albeit, with a longer timeline to reverse the trend than was assumed earlier in the year. While we tend to agree with that view, the Fed also has an…

In Part 1 (HERE), we gave bankers an overview of decentralized finance and the increasing use of smart contracts in banking. Our tortured analogy was based on how children are similar to using smart contracts as they are a store of value and a message all in one bundle of joy that can move independently…

Hot Retails Sales Turns Up the Heat on the Fed The heat on the Fed is only being turned up lately. First, it was last week’s October CPI numbers that had inflation on the tips of everyone’s tongues. Now it’s a hotter-than-expected retail sales report for October that seems to indicate that while consumers may…

The capital structure of a business refers to the mix of debt and equity used to finance the company’s assets and operations. The simplest forms of financing for a business are equity and debt, although there are many hybrids. Equity represents the most expensive form of financing.  Because debt is legally first to be paid,…

Expect Plenty of Fed Speak on Inflation After the October CPI numbers last week there will be no escaping the topic for Fed officials that venture out into the public sphere. This week there are nine such officials speaking and their views on inflation, and what the Fed will do about it, will be front…

October CPI Report Changes Narrative for the Fed The October CPI report has set an uncomfortable narrative for the Fed as we approach year-end and that new narrative will make it harder for them to preach patience in the face of the highest inflation readings in 30 years. While Powell and his fellow governors likely…

On Friday, Congress passed the $1.2T Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (the “Act” or “IIJA”) which goes to the President’s desk next week when Congress returns to become law and starts to go into effect January 1, 2022. IIJA targets our electricity grid, transportation infrastructure, the digital divide, and economic resiliency. In this article, we…

October CPI, Fed Speak, and Budget Bill Madness This holiday-interrupted week (Veterans Day on Thursday) will be headlined by the latest inflation data. With the October jobs report posting strong numbers, and with impressive wage gains, investors will be casting a weary eye on the CPI numbers. The Fed has planted their flag squarely in…

As Mark Twain said, it is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.  However, there are a substantial number of concrete and high probability events that we think we can prognosticate about the next couple of years that will have significant impacts on community banking. The October payroll gains at 531k were the largest…