Consumer Economy
- Quits: Total Private (JTS1000QUR); 2.0 -0.1
New series for me – this is the number of people who quit their jobs voluntarily divided by total employment. Concept: as the employment situation gets more iffy, fewer people will leave their jobs voluntarily, so a decline in Quits is a recessionary indicator. Note this series is seasonally adjusted – the NSA series is really chaotic-looking.
No updates to the normal series are available. Armstrong observes:
October 2025 Partial US Economic Data Blackout [Dec 11]
Governments never suspend economic data because things are going well.
(source – armstrong)
Credit & Rates
- Fed Balance Sheet (WALCL) 6.54T +3.5B (+0.05% w/w)]
- Total Bank Credit (TOTBKCR) 18.87T -39.7B (-0.21% w/w)
- 30 Year Mortgage Rate (MORTGAGE30US) 6.22% +3 bp
- 3 Month Treasury (DGS3MO) 4.19% -8 bp
- 10 Year Treasury (DGS10) 4.19% +5 bp
- 30 Year Treasury (DGS30) 4.85% +6 bp
- 20+ Year Treasury ETF (TLT) 87.34 -0.83 -0.94%
Bank credit actually shrank this week by a fair amount. These things happen sometimes, but this week’s $40 billion decline was the largest drop this year. If it continues, that’s depression territory. While The Donald thinks lower rates will keep the economy BOOMING, if you (the little-person borrower) don’t think you can make money from taking on more debt, you won’t borrow money regardless of the rate.
Example: if the market is crashing, will you borrow money to buy equities on margin, even if the rate is 2%? Duh, of course not.
We had a Fed Rate Cut on Wednesday – Powell et al cut by 25 basis points, with 3 people dissenting. The Fed also announced an “ample reserves” policy (i.e. money printing) starting on December 12th, with $40 billion in Treasury purchases as a starting amount. They tried hard to pretend that money printing wasn’t actually money printing.
Ample Reserves. Safe & Effective. Take the shot to save Grandma. Not like my confidence in institutions has collapsed or anything.
Fed says it will start technical buying of Treasury bills to manage market liquidity [Dec 11]
(source – pfizer/reuters)
Looking at the rate map, this week, the 3M-1Y instruments (red box) have all fallen below the new Fed Funds Rate (3.64%), but the rest of the rate map (green box) moved higher. For
by westcoastjan 
