The Rasputin Effect: Global Economic and Equity Market Resilience

I always value your analysis, and colorful and amusing references, e.g., Visigoths; and particularly the viseral metaphor of Rasputin’s difficult death for the resilient American economy. And I have a question on the latest, in point 1 on why the signal from the inverted yield curve is different this time. I agree that it’s been an unreliable guide due to the manipulation of massive QE, but QT is on now and even the real yield curve, expressed by TIPS or CPI Swaps, is severely inverted. But on the point that money is still cheap, based on your real FF calculation, I think I learned In microeconomics class a long time ago that an expression of a real interest rate must be deflated by a measure of expected future inflation, not historical, as borrowers are prospectively focused. Using either one or two year TIPS spreads or CPI swaps would show a mid-3% real Fed Funds rate, which I think qualifies as tight money. Am I missing something?

Absolutely agree with the well argued thesis’ and the conclusion “The overall pulse does not point to a significant contraction, just to modestly weaker US conditions in 6-9 months” By end of year could the mkts catch up for last year’s losses YoY and perhpas even show a small gain to reach new highs? (Have to check out the rather intresting mentions from opiates to penicillin ??)

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Thanks for the facts and figures. Let me see “Third man” and read the book “Empire of Pain”.??