Vincent Deluard Profile picture
Jul 16, 2021 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
WHAT HAPPENED TO MY REFLATION TRADE? A thread

The past two months have been brutal for my PA.

Some news was objectively bad for inflation trades: delta variant, Fed, China slowdown ... but not enough to justify this massacre.

Let's dig deeper 👇👇 (1/6)
POSTIONING

Always a weak argument (there is a buyer for every seller), but reflation had become the consensus by June and spec traders were abnormally short bonds.

This anomaly has been mostly corrected (2/6)
TARGET-DATE FUND REBALANCING

Funny how the 10-year yield peaked on March 31, the last day of Q1! 🤔🤔

Stocks outperformed bonds by 45% between June 2020 and June 2021. Target-date funds had to buy a lot of bonds to get back to their target allocations

(3/6)
EUR & JPY FLOW INTO TREASURIES:

On March 31, .S. 10Y UST paid 2% more than German bunds and 1.6% more than JGBs.

Hedging costs collapsed at the same time. A hedged position in 10 Y U.S. Treasuries yielded 1.3% in Japan and 93 bp in Germany (4/6)
PSYCHOLOGY

Reflation would destroy the bedrock of the past 40 years: the negative relation between stocks and bonds, the Fed put, rising multiples, and 10% returns for 60/40 portfolios. Investors prefer to believe central bankers, rather than “their own lying eyes”.

(5/6)
THIS TOO SHALL PASS

Citi inflation surprise index still soaring.

Reflation sectors are still crazy cheap, especially as their earnings will soar next year

Sign up for a free trial of my @StoneX_Official reports at marketintel.intlfcstone.com/MIPublic/Landi…

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More from @VincentDeluard

Aug 28, 2025
📢Economic Growth, Stocks' Return, and Global Debasement - The Long-Term Evidence 📢

Who has grown the fastest in the past 20 years, who has delivered the best returns, and is there a relation?

The answers might surprise you 👇👇 Image
First, there is little relation between economic growth and stocks' return, even over 20 years

GDP growth explains just 15% of stocks' returns

Stocks' returns are driven by margins, dividends, and changes in multiples

Broadly speaking, the BRICS create GDP, the US delivers capital gains, and Europe produces neitherImage
Second, only two stock markets (barely) outperformed gold in the past 20 years: the US and Taiwan, mostly due to the AI / semi bull market.

Gold has returned 10.7% PA (in USD) since 2005. The combination of soaring gold and a strong USD was too hard to beat for most international stocks.

For the past 20 years, most stocks could not keep up with monetary debasement, despite high nominal gainsImage
Read 5 tweets
Oct 10, 2024
THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY - INFLATION 🧵

I have warned that inflation was secular since April 2020 and that the 2% target was dead

43 months after the last sub-2% CPI print, inflation is stuck at a plateau of 3-4%. Here is what matters Image
Image
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First, the Good - Shelter

Shelter CPI dropped to 2.7% annualized, from 6.4% in August

The gap between the BLS' measure of shelter costs and market-based indices is narrowing

... but the costs to maintain a building remain above 2%, esp. as insurance premia will rise Image
Image
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Then the Bad - Core Services

Super core services CPI (ex. housing) has been stuck at 4 - 4.5% for more than a year.

My favorite measure of core inflation, the cost of a haircut, is up 5.2% in 2024.

The samee goes for most wage-intensive services Image
Read 5 tweets
May 15, 2024
The average restaurant service worker earns $16 an hour.

He must WORK 35 MINUTES TO BUY A BIG MAC AND A GALLON OF GAS

With the CA bill raising the fast food minimum wage to $20/ hour, that would be 27 mn, the least in history Image
Please spare me knee-jerk political comments

📢📢 I am NOT saying that fast food workers are overpaid
📢📢I am NOT saying that Gen-Z and service workers are living their best lives in 2024

I think McDonald's workers should be able to afford Big Macs and fill their tanks.
What I am saying is that service wages have kept up with pace of basic necessities (but NOT with assets and houses, more on this later).

High prices hurt, but most consumers can fill up the tank and eat out at fast food chains

➡️The economy will not slow on its own. Indeed GDP now is at 4%+ for Q2 💪💪Image
Read 10 tweets
Apr 17, 2024
Since 1980, the ratio of household net worth to the US median wage has increased by 370%.

This is the single most important chart for finance, economics, and politics. Image
This chart summarizes the 700 pages of Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century

If "r" (the return on capital) exceeds "g" (economic growth), inequalities increase over time, and workers lose wealth against capitalists
Sure, the classical argument is that everyone is gettting richer.

Low-income households still get smartphones, flat-screen TVs, and Netflix subscriptions.

But there only so many homes in coastal cities, so many quality schools, and so many attractive mates.
Read 13 tweets
Mar 19, 2024
WHY THE FED WILL SPOOK MARKETS TOMORROW👇👇

The Fed has effectively 3 mandates: inflation, employment, and asset prices.

For a few glorious months, it achieved all three.

But the inflation mandate has become orthogonal with rising asset prices. Image
In the 2010s, the wealth effect channel was clogged -when Bernanke needed it

QE, ZIRP, and forward guidance boosted asset prices, with no effect on growth

Indebted households repaired their balance sheets, and soaring asset prices benefitted the very wealthy, whose MPC is close to zero.

See the orange dots on the scatter below. No relation between household net worth and future inflation.Image
But the 2010s was the exception!

Increases in wealth lead to increase in consumption and, in time, in prices.

Before the GFC , a 1% increase in wealth led to a 0.2% increase inflation the following year (blue dots) Image
Read 8 tweets
Feb 29, 2024
The Fed's preferred inflation measure, core PCE, rose at an annualized 5.1% last month, its highest growth in a year

Just a month ago, the futures market priced SEVEN cuts in 2024! And yet, the rebound of inflation was predictable

Extracts from my report "Life Finds a Way" 👇
Image
Image
In the deflationist view, inflation is the CPI, and what gets measured is what matters.

In the narrow world of the owners’ equivalent rent, the retained earnings method, and hedonic adjustments, inflation was a one-time accident caused by COVID and supply chain disruptions.
For example, the fact that the BLS measures of shelter costs lag behind market-based measure by 10 to 20 % does not matter because few people bought homes in the past year and many leases have not been repriced Image
Read 10 tweets

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