Month: April 2023

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

U.S. authorities rejected multiple people who sought compensation for COVID-19 vaccine injuries, despite diagnoses from doctors, documents show.

Letters from U.S. officials reviewed by The Epoch Times show officials contradicting doctors who treated patients as they turned down requests for payment.

Cody Flint, an agricultural pilot, was diagnosed by four doctors with a severe adverse reaction to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Shortly after being vaccinated, Flint experienced intense head pressure, which led to problems such as perilymphatic fistula, the doctors said.

Flint sent a slew of medical files, including evidence of the diagnoses, to the U.S. Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which compensates people who prove they were injured by a COVID-19 shot.

But administrators for the program rejected Flint’s application in a denial letter, saying they “did not find the requisite evidence that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination caused” the conditions from which he suffers.

Flint, in his 30s, felt his first symptoms within an hour of vaccination. An onslaught of severe symptoms followed while he was flying two days later.

“One second I went from having burning in the back of my neck and tunnel vision to the very next second I was slumped over in my airplane. The best way I know to describe it, it was like a bomb went off inside my head,” Flint said.

CICP administrators told him that “compelling, reliable and valid medical and scientific evidence does not support a causal association between the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, perilymphatic fistulas, increased intracranial pressure, Eustachian tube dysfunction, hearing loss, or loss of eyesight.”

They also tried to pin the problems on barotrauma. Colloquially known as airplane ear, barotrauma happens when air pressure suddenly changes, and is common as planes climb higher in the sky. Barotrauma causes the fistulas and symptoms of the fistulas “began while flying,” administrators wrote.

Flint and his doctors asserted in appeal letters that the barotrauma theory doesn’t hold up because Flint flies low as he dusts crops. Flint’s condition is “not from barotrauma,” Flint’s doctors told the CICP. “As an agricultural pilot, he does not fly more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground which is not of a magnitude to where he is at risk for barotrauma.”

“Elevated intracranial pressure has been recognized as a complication of COVID vaccination, and given the sequence of events, more probable than not, it is the cause of Mr. Flint’s elevated intracranial pressure, which had been documented on lumbar puncture,” they added. “The elevated intracranial pressure led to his perilymphatic fistula. Elevated intracranial pressure is a cause for perilymphatic fistula and more probable.”

The CICP determination was reviewed by a panel that sided with administrators. The panel found that the COVID-19 vaccine “did not cause Mr. Flint to develop bilateral perlympathic fistulas and related symptoms,” Suma Nair, an administrator, told Flint in a final denial letter. “There is no compelling causal connection between the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and the symptomology Mr. Flint experienced; the more likely cause of Mr. Flint’s symptoms is trauma from flying a plane, which would have developed over time.”

Administrators cited no studies or other evidence in their letters.

Flint said that the determination was wrong, pointing to a number of papers detailing post-vaccination intracranial and other neurological issues. He also noted a study that said intracranial pressure can cause perilymphatic fistulas.

Nair also said the panel concluded: “given the timeline of symptoms, it was not plausible for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to have caused the otologic and vestibular issues experienced by Mr. Flint.”

“It’s just all comical to me,” Flint told The Epoch Times. “I get the shot, I’m injured within 48 hours, and they say that that makes it implausible.”

Difficulty Getting Compensation

The case highlights how people who experienced problems after vaccination have struggled to get money from the federal government, even when doctors diagnose vaccine injuries.

Flint is one of 76 people who were rejected as of April 1 because administrators determined they did not “show that a covered serious physical injury was sustained as the direct result of the administration” of a COVID-19 vaccine.

“The CICP may only make such determinations based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence,” the program says.

More than 8,100 applications, as of April 1, have been submitted to the CICP for compensation for a COVID-19 vaccine-induced injury or death. Three hundred and sixty-two in total have been turned down. Just 23 have been accepted. All but two are for a type of heart inflammation called myocarditis or a related condition known as pericarditis, both of which U.S. authorities say are caused by COVID-19 vaccination.

Documents on the denials and acceptances have been largely withheld from the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, successful in unearthing information about COVID-19 vaccine safety, have yielded few documents. Administrators located 652 records in response to one request seeking all claims and associated documents. They only released 52 heavily redacted documents, citing exceptions to FOIA. A similar request returned a single page that wasn’t already public.

COVID-19 vaccine injuries fall under the CICP, a little-used program before the pandemic that was created by Congress in a 2005 bill, because of a Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act declaration entered during the Trump administration that has not yet been rescinded.

Most administered vaccines in the United States fall under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, enabling people with alleged or actual injuries to take their cases to federal judges in a no-fault system that paid out $4.8 billion between 1988 and 2022.

Decisions on CICP petitions, in contrast, are decided by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)—the same agency that operates the program.

That “potentially creates a conflict of interest,” researchers wrote in a 2022 paper, advising Congress to initiate major reforms by either relocating the program or allowing judicial review of determinations.

Read more here…

So much for the “strength” of the consumer.

Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank just pulled the plug on the narrative that America’s aggregate spending strength is anything but a mirage of extreme wealth thriving while a vast majority of Americans are struggling through amid core inflation pain.

We already know that Americans have been leaning on their credit cards to make ends meet...

But now, Capital One’s CEO has pointed out the delinquency rate for customers at least 30 days late on payment rose 134 basis points from one year earlier to 3.66% – reaching the highest level since March 2019.

And it’s going to get worse, as charge-offs – the rate at which banks take on losses for debt they no longer believe will be paid off – haven’t yet caught up to delinquencies.

Fairbank acknowledged it’s likely they will also return to 2019 levels around the middle of the year – lagging a quarter or two behind the industry, as happened during the pandemic and global financial crisis.

Specifically, the write-off rate in the firm’s US credit-card portfolio soared to 4.04% in this year’s first three months ($1.7 billion), almost double the rate a year earlier, and the Virginia-based lender said provision for credit losses soared to $2.8 billion in the quarter ended March, up from $677 million a year ago.

The driver for that expected loss is simple – reality!

“We are assuming a material worsening of labor markets with the unemployment rate rising from today’s very low levels to above 5% by the end of 2023,” the CEO told analysts on a conference call.

“We are also assuming adverse effects from inflation and some further worsening of consumer profiles from the flip side of their extraordinary outperformance in the earlier period during the pandemic.”

Put another way – Fairbank expects an imminent recession as The Fed itself forecasts a 4.5% unemployment rate by year-end and calls that a “shallow recession”…

None of this should be a surprise (to anyone who is simply not buying every word coming out of The White House).

“There are nascent signs of trouble brewing” in credit delinquencies, Glenmede’s Jason Pride and Michael Reynolds warned in a research note this month, adding:

“An ever-larger share of credit balances have transitioned to early stages of delinquency, consistent with past periods of recession.”

It appears the economic “pain” that Powell warned about is starting to strike the ‘average joe’.

Last August, Powell said that “while higher interest rates, slower growth, and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses. These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation. But a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain.”

With the banking crisis re-escalating (cough FRC cough), the question is just how significant will this credit tightening be and how sustained will it be before The Fed is forced to fold?

Authored by John Rubino via substack,

Why a shrinking money supply risks a massive, uncontrolled crash…

You probably hear the term “Ponzi scheme” tossed around frequently out there, but you may not know what it is and why it matters. So here’s a little background from Wikipedia:

A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.[1] Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, the scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity (e.g., product sales or successful investments), and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as new investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to own.

In the 1920s, Charles Ponzi carried out this scheme and became well known throughout the United States because of the huge amount of money that he took in.[4] His original scheme was based on the legitimate arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps, but he soon began diverting new investors’ money to make payments to earlier investors and to himself.[5] Unlike earlier similar schemes, Ponzi’s gained considerable press coverage both within the United States and internationally both while it was being perpetrated and after it collapsed – this notoriety eventually led to the type of scheme being named after him.[6]

The key takeaway is that a Ponzi scheme dies when the inflow of new money is insufficient to pay off existing investors victims. To understand why this matters today, let’s do a thought experiment. Say that in the coming year, the US has to pay out 5% more for Medicare and Social Security, and 7% more for its global military empire. Meanwhile, businesses with debts coming due have to roll them over at higher interest rates, while homeowners with adjustable-rate mortgages see their monthly payments rise.

In the aggregate, that’s a lot of new dollars — let’s say half a trillion — that didn’t exist a year ago but are needed now. And they have to come from somewhere. In a normal fiat currency system, the central bank simply creates the needed currency out of thin air, everyone gets paid, and the resulting decline in the value of the currency is small enough that few are bothered.

But that’s not what’s happening today. As the above obligations come due, the amount of available money is … shrinking. The following chart of the M2 money supply growth rate shows a massive spike from all the covid lockdown stimmy checks (which partially accounts for last year’s surge in consumer prices) and a correspondingly dramatic plunge this year. Note that during the entire fiat currency era, M2 has never before gone down.

This means some debts won’t be paid. Creditors thus stiffed will fail to pay their debts and so on until sectors start blowing up. Think back to last month’s local and regional bank near-death experience for a relatively benign example of what this unraveling will look like.

To sum up, the current global financial system is a Ponzi scheme and the new money spigot has been turned off. Excitement is about to ensue.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting

During the pandemic, central banks discovered how easy it is to flood an economy with newly-conjured cash. The US, for instance, simply mailed checks to citizens and gifted “loans” to small businesses while tossing trillions in loan guarantees and direct aid at favored large corporations. Easy peasy.

When today’s Ponzi scheme starts to unravel, those same governments will be faced with a choice between letting virtually everything grind to a halt as trouble at the collapsing periphery starts heading for the core (that is, as small players die in ways that threaten JP Morgan Chase), or restarting the stimmy check machine, but on a much bigger scale and with a major twist:

Instead of sending out paper or electronic checks to individual bank accounts, the Fed will roll out its much-discussed central bank digital currency and fund “free” account balances for everyone who it deems worthy of such a gift. The vast majority, traumatized by the disappearance of their jobs and stock portfolios, will willingly accept the free money. And just like that, the next financial system is born.

Which, as always, takes us back to gold and silver. History says the first phase of this process will feature an equities bear market that takes precious metals down for the ride. But in the second phase (i.e., the CBDC introduction), people who prefer not to own “programable” currency that’s monitored 24/7 by the NSA will convert their Fed bucks to real assets. Shortages of gold and silver will ensue and prices will respond accordingly.

On Friday morning, natural gas futures soared following the news that a lightning strike had caused the shutdown of a Columbia Gulf compressor station in Mississippi.

A video posted on Twitter shows what appears to be a fire at the Corinth Compressor Station in Corinth, Mississippi. 

🚨#BREAKING: Lightning has struck the Columbia gulf gas pipeline causing a massive fiery explosion ⁰⁰📌#Corinth | #Mississippi

Currently numerous emergency crews and other agencies have assembled at Columbia Gulf gas pipeline in Corinth, Mississippi in response to massive… pic.twitter.com/WIVfheqz5m

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) April 28, 2023

News of potential disruptions at Corinth Compressor Station sent NatGas futures soaring around 0800 ET from $2.300/MMBtu to $2.50. Prices have since subsided to $2.39. 

Houston-based energy firm Criterion Research emailed clients about “the Columbia Gulf force majeure that was declared this morning at the Corinth Compressor Station.”

We wanted to follow up on our prior alert and provide more details and graphics surrounding the Columbia Gulf force majeure that was declared this morning at the Corinth Compressor Station.

The high-level impact will be the loss of 0.4 Bcf/d in Southbound throughput on Columbia Gulf, which in turn will likely correlate to a drop in production receipts on Columbia Gas (TCO) in Appalachia. We will now cover that idea in more detail.

A lightning strike hit the facility this morning in Mississippi, causing a fire onsite and the immediate shutdown of all physical flows to zero. Corinth’s Southbound flows were approximately 2.19 Bcf/d with the early-cycle flows today, and the next cycle will likely see them revised to zero.

However, CGT says they are “in the process of making operational adjustments to allow a portion of volume to resume flowing through the impacted segment of the system.” The early view by CGT is that the adjustments would allow CorinSEG backhaul capacity to be run at a reduced 1,750,000 Dth/d effective ID1 for Gas Day April 28, 2023.

The impact on firm service was estimated at 400,000 Dth/d and it’s important to note that “the capacity setting through CorinSEG is subject to change based on operating conditions at Corinth Compressor Station during the Force Majeure.”

Based on the past seven days of flows into Corinth, the outage will likely push 430 Mmcf/d back into Columbia Gas (TCO) in the Northeastern US.

North of the CorinSEG, CGT receives a lion’s share of its supply from Columbia Gas (TCO) at the Leach meter station, along with limited receipts from TETCO at Adair.

The TCO Leach meter station has been delivering >2 Bcf/d into CGT throughout the second half of April. With Corinth down, we would expect this point to drop in the near term.

Historically, capacity restrictions on CorinSEG have directly correlated with production shut-ins on Columbia Gas, as you can see below.

The same correlation holds between TCO production and the Leach meter station that delivers into Columbia Gulf. 

Columbia Gas delivers more than 3 Bcf/d of its daily supply to delivery points spread across Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia, and the Leach station accounts for a third of that flow. Other notable points where some gas could be diverted include TGP-Broad Run (0.1-0.2 Bcf/d in available capacity), Dominion Cove Point (0.1-0.3 Bcf/d in available capacity) and Transco-Boswells Tavern (0.1-0.2 Bcf/d in available capacity.)

Columbia Gas deliveries into TGP Broad Run tend to run fairly close to max observed rates, but there is some room left to divert gas.

Meanwhile, the more likely paths to move the stranded 430 Mmcf/d would be into the Dominion Cove Point station or Transco’s Boswell Tavern Delivery meter.

*Developing

  

By Nour al Ali, Bloomberg markets live reporter and strategist

Tensions between OPEC+ and the IEA are likely to persist amid concerns about the global economy and demand. That doesn’t bode well for crude in the short term.

The Brent crude prompt spread, which flipped earlier this week to trade in contango, a bearish market structure, for the first time since January, highlights growing worries about demand and refinery consumption.

The IEA renewed its criticism of OPEC+’s production cuts, saying they stoke inflation, while OPEC’s Secretary-General, Haitham Al-Ghais, said volatility in oil prices is being driven by calls to halt investment rather than OPEC’s policies.

The spat coincides with weakening oil-refining profits over the past few weeks, causing companies to consider lower processing rates. Headline oil prices have dipped below $80 as it struggled to find support.

Bloomberg strategists see Brent’s fair value closer to $90 a barrel. But that may be difficult in the short term against the headwinds of sustained concern over recession, the potential for more monetary tightening, and weakening refining margins.

Shortly after the monumental collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last month, an absurd theory emerged that it was the “first Twitter-fueled bank run,” which, according to CIA-linked organizations such as the Alethea Group, was amplified by websites such as ZeroHedge for allegedly contributing to “increased online panic about SVB.”

Alethea even shopped a ‘dossier’ to various media outlets – including Bloomberg (which excluded ZeroHedge from their report following a brief email exchange). And when one ‘journalist’ did peddle the dossier on Twitter, she was mercilessly mocked as a propagandist.

You mean a financial newsblog published a number of stories about a significant bank failure? How dare they!!

— Reason and analytics in Dallas (@DallasAnalytics) March 17, 2023

Then, in late March, Bloomberg reported that “SVB’s demise swirled on private VC founder networks before hitting Twitter.”

“It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” said one Silicon Valley startup founder who wishes to remain anonymous. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.“

Facts: 1, CIA Alethea: 0

Now, the Federal Reserve has admitted in a new report that its own regulatory failures contributed to SVBs collapse.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

The Federal Reserve’s banking supervisors failed to take forceful action to address growing problems at Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed last month, the central bank’s top regulator said, signaling a broad push to toughen rules on the industry.

Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, said supervisors didn’t fully appreciate the extent of the vulnerabilities as SVB grew in size and complexity. When supervisors did find risks, they didn’t take sufficient steps to ensure the firm fixed those problems quickly enough, he said in a report Friday.

Regulators took control of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB on March 10. The collapse sparked a panic that led to the failure of New York-based Signature Bank and an intervention by financial regulators to protect uninsured depositors at both banks.

In fact, three of the four top takeaways about the events leading to SVB’s collapse are tied to perceived shortcomings with Fed oversight responsibilities.

Mr. Barr said mistakes by Fed regulators were driven in part by the Trump-era changes that generally eased rules on midsize banks. He also said a shift in the agency’s culture appears to have resulted in a lighter-touch form of supervision.

Those changes “impeded effective supervision by reducing standards, increasing complexity, and promoting a less assertive supervisory approach,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Fed said while supervisors had identified issues regarding interest-rate risk which contributed to SVB’s failure, its own process was “too deliberative” and focused on building too much evidence before taking action. In fact, SVB had 31 open supervisory findings – or warnings – from regulators at the time of its failure, a figure 3x that of peer firms, according to the Fed.

“…the Fed overlooked broader problems in recent years as the bank grew. For example, for a long time, it used metrics for liquidity that suggested SVB had a stable deposit base and rated the bank’s interest-rate risk as satisfactory despite the firm breaching internal risk limits over a number of years.”

In response to the findings, Barr on Friday called for a revamping of rules that apply to banks with more than $100 billion in assets, as well as a re-evaluation of how regulators treat deposits above the $250,000 FDIC limit.

Meanwhile, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a coordinated statement that he backed steps outlined by Barr to toughen industry oversight – effectively reversing some moves made earlier during Powell’s tenure to ease rules on midsize banks in order to create “a stronger and more resilient banking system.”

Back to the propagandists…

It’s worth noting that Alethea – run by 32-year-old Deep State figurehead and former staffer for Sen. Angus King – cropped up in 2019, and last November received $10 million from Ballistic Ventures, whose general partner is Ted Schlein. Ted “provides counsel to the U.S. intelligence community, serves on the Board of Trustees at InQTel (CIA), and was recently named as a board member of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.“

And what’s this? As we learned from the “Twitter Files,” Last June, the advisory board recommended that CISA [on whose board Schlein sits] should work with and provide support to external partners “who identify emergent informational threats,” and find ways to mitigate “false and misleading narratives.”

Last June, the advisory board recommended that CISA should work with and provide support to external partners “who identify emergent informational threats,” and find ways to mitigate “false and misleading narratives.”

…The group worried about how to “strategically approach MDM…

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 24, 2023

In short, government-linked ‘external partners’ were peddling narrative-shaping propaganda using proprietary “Hamilton 68-esque” methods they pulled from various orifices – when in reality, the Fed’s oversight failures and VC chatter in ‘private chat rooms and message groups’ contributed to the collapse of SVB.

Read the Fed’s report below:

By Ven Ram, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

The yen is copping it after the Bank of Japan left its policy settings unchanged as expected, though there was a clear inkling from the statement that change may be in the air.

For starters, the BOJ did away with this boilerplate that had been a feature in the pandemic years:

For the time being, while closely monitoring the impact of COVID-19, the Bank will support financing, mainly of firms, and maintain stability in financial markets, and will not hesitate to take additional easing measures if necessary; it also expects short- and long-term policy interest rates to remain at their present or lower levels.

The bank also added this bit for good measure, which weighed on the yen given the rather longish time frame:

…the Bank has decided to conduct a broad-perspective review of monetary policy, with a planned time frame of around one to one and a half years.

Ironically, heading into the decision, we got news that Japan’s headline inflation accelerated more than forecast in April, retail sales surged, and there were more jobs available than there were applicants. All of this should revive the yen once the short-term positions that were opened in the run-up to the BOJ meeting are wound down. Not surprisingly, JGBs rallied, as colleague Mark Cranfield writes.

Meanwhile in Europe, we will get a slew of data that will play into the European Central Bank’s quantum of hike that we are likely to get in May.

Overnight in the US, we got a reminder yet again from the GDP data that inflation can’t simply be wished away. The markets have been unduly optimistic that inflation will slow just because policymakers have neat projections and presentations showing milder numbers. Earlier this week, a case was made for linker bonds to outperform nominal bonds, and that should continue to be the case.

We will get more of that today from the University of Michigan’s inflation survey. Last month, expectations surged a full percentage point to 4.6%, but the markets glossed over the print. If we get a sticky reading this time around, the reaction — coming as those numbers do after Thursday’s inflation scare — may cause a further selloff in front-end Treasuries.

Even so, I fully expect the two-year Treasury yields to yo-yo between 4.15% and 4.30% for reasons outlined here. And with First Republic’s woes still unresolved, rich Treasuries getting richer may be the theme.

By Benjamin Picton of Rabobank

I Want To Believe

As a kid growing up in the 1990s The X-Files was one of the coolest shows on TV. Mum (Mom for our American audience) would never let me watch it, because it would give me nightmares, but on the occasions when Dad was left in charge I could convince him it was ok. For those who have never seen it, the basic premise is that FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dr Dana Scully investigate mysteries with a supernatural or extra-terrestrial bent. Scully is a sceptic; she always has a scientific theory to explain unusual phenomena. Mulder, on the other hand, “wants to believe”.

We want to believe too. Specifically, we want to believe Jerome Powell’s assurances that a soft landing for the US economy is still possible. Inconveniently, like a kill-joy Scully, economic data keeps throwing up evidence to suggest that this theory is far-fetched. Yesterday we got our first look at first quarter GDP figures for the United States. The numbers were unequivocally disappointing. Annualized growth was a measly 1.1% vs a Bloomberg consensus estimate of 1.9%. Even more disappointingly, the core PCE deflator lifted from 4.4% in the final quarter of last year to 4.9%, which was two ticks above what the market was expecting. That looks an awful lot like stagflation, but labor markets are still holding up (for now). US weekly jobless claims fell by 16,000 to 230,000.

Powell himself wants to believe. He has been suckered twice in the last 24 hours. Firstly by Argentina, who have agreed to pay for their imports from China in CNY in order to conserve precious dollars. As my colleague Michael Every put it, Powell must have been singing “don’t CNY for me Argentina”, and regretting that the Fed never extended a dollar swap line to prevent the Argentinians from knocking another leg out from under the dollar system. Already having a bad day, Powell was then embarrassed by the release of a video of two Russian comedians pranking the Fed chief over the phone by apparently convincing him that he was speaking to Ukrainian President Zelensky. Zelensky himself has a past life as a comedian, so I guess it’s an easy mistake to make.

Looking at dataflow over the course of the week, things were very mixed. There was certainly a theme of juxtaposition between banks and the tech stocks as we saw strong results from Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon, but banks have been under pressure since the release of First Republic’s results on Monday. Both US Treasuries and German Bunds have bear-flattened over the course of the week, and oil markets have been volatile. Brent crude fell below $80/bbl for the first time since March 31st, despite data last week showing an unexpectedly large decline in inventories, and crack spreads have been tightening as refining utilisation grows and confidence deteriorates. Meanwhile, a Bloomberg survey showed that market participants believe that the banking crisis adds about 50bps worth of endogenous tightening to US credit markets. Nobody knows what the real number is, but that’s twice as much as Jerome Powell had suggested.

The DXY index has weakened a little over the course of the week, while EURUSD has held on to gains and is on track for a weekly close above 1.10. The week ain’t over yet though, and with a BOJ meeting today and European first quarter growth figures due out, there are still plenty of catalysts for volatility ahead. Indeed, Tokyo CPI inflation numbers released this morning show y-o-y price growth of 3.5% in April. That’s two ticks higher than expected, and the core readings look even stronger. Meanwhile, the Japanese jobless rate rose to 2.8% when it was expected to fall one tick to 2.5%. That all looks stagflationary too, but new BOJ Governor Ueda has said that the economy is past the peak for cost-push inflation. We want to believe!

Europe has been a bright spot this week. Wars and fractious political systems aside, the continent has been outperforming everyone’s low expectations from last year. That is why we have been seeing a bid in EURUSD for a few weeks now. Similarly, the Euro Stoxx 50 is up by almost 15% YTD. That really puts the S&P500’s 7.7% YTD gain in the shade, and is only beaten by the 16% lift in the NASDAQ. Several ECB speakers this week have been upbeat on European growth prospects. Philip Lane told Le Monde on Tuesday that the dataflow is strong enough to justify another rate rise next week, Isabel Schnabel suggested that hike might be a half percentage point, while Luis de Guindos said that fears of a recession in the first quarter would not be realised. Rabobank Research concurs, and this week published a note detailing our view that Eurozone 1st quarter GDP figures released today could come in stronger than the expected 0.2% q-o-q as receding supply shocks and China reopening have helped manufacturing output to lift.

It has also been a big week in the Land Down Under. Markets had been eagerly awaiting the release of 1st quarter consumer inflation numbers this week to shore up bets on what the RBA might do when it meets to set monetary policy next Tuesday. The inflation report was mixed at first blush, but ultimately perceived as soft by rates traders. The trimmed-mean measure came in two ticks below expectations at 1.2% q-o-q, while headline inflation was a tick stronger than consensus estimates. Crucially, the report showed that non-tradable inflation at 1.9% was much stronger than the 0.3% for tradables in the quarter. This was a similar result to the New Zealand CPI report last week, and really highlights that inflation is now being domestically generated and can no longer be credibly blamed on broken supply chains and Vladimir Putin.

Australia is doing a little better than New Zealand on the trade front though. Figures this week showed Aussie export prices unexpectedly lifted by 1.2% in the first quarter, while import prices fell by 4.2%. That means that the Aussie terms of trade boom is still rolling on, but over in New Zealand it is a different story. Data this week showed the Kiwi trade deficit widened to $16.4bn over the 12 months to March as demand for dairy, proteins and timber products continues to be lacklustre. Those numbers look diabolical for an economy that is heavily dependent on foreign financing, running a fiscal deficit of ~4.9% and recorded a contraction in GDP of 0.6% in the December quarter. Can New Zealand avoid stagflation? We want to believe