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It's dissenters everywhere... Even the Old Lady, it seems, can't get a unanimous decision to stay at 0 forever these days. Of course, in the UK, trotting out Sentance is probably Mervynator's ploy to try to put a lid on inflation expectations.

Why do you say the growth projections are unrealistic? I would have thought that the OBR numbers are somewhat on the conservative side.

79 did look cheap... If I am not mistaken, I was seeing 85/88 mkt. Could be me pricing a different contract, obv, since I don't have access to Oanda.

23% of fiscal consolidation from taxation, 77% from expenditure reduction.

US is certainly not fine. I think it won't be too long before the baleful eye of the mkt turns on its fiscal situation. It will be even more dire, given how starkly it's likely to contrast vs the Western sovs that have started fiscal tightening. Of course, the flip side is that the US still...

Personally, I'd view these sorts of trades as a recipe for disaster... Too many moving parts, some of which are proper "unknown unknowns" (may Rumsfeld forgive me).

No, the issue is whether the expected risk-adjusted return is positive. The problem is that, over a medium-term horizon, the performance of systematic short vol/gamma strategies is relatively unattractive.

I don't know, you tell me... Maybe, it's not just risk-on. Maybe it's the newly found optimism about the ability of the UK govt to deal with its budget woes vs the newly found pessimism about the ability to resolve this in the US of A.

It's just risk-on...

It was the qtrly SNB meeting. The were quite a bit more upbeat about the Swiss economy than expected. Specifically, they stated that they're no longer as worried about the possibility of deflation, which had always been their main motivation for intervention.

Attachment here...

This is one of the flavors of what's known as a risk-reversal. This one consists of selling a put and buying a call spread. 1) Some people like to frame selling of puts by suggesting that it's equivalent to buying the underlying for the price determined by the strike of the put. Firstly...

I haven't unwrapped it, so to speak, as I am afraid it's likely to be NSFW... Thank you, though, I am sure I will enjoy it, in the privacy of my home.

I am not entirely sure what you're saying... Basically a large amount of money on deposit at the central bank (Fed, ECB, etc) means to me, on the supply side, a high degree of risk-aversion in the banking system, and/or a low demand for credit in the real economy. That would be my...

This, in all likelihood, means nothing, apart from the fact that there's a large (€442bn) operation maturing on Jul 1st. Banks are simply getting ready for the rolloff.

The BLS actually publishes four different CPI values: CPI-U (the one the mkts look at), CPI-W, C-CPI-U (chained version of CPI-U) and the experimental CPI-E for the elderly. CPI-W is the number used for the COLA.

Good luck with that...

It's the World Cup. Cable ain't going anywhere.

Sure, it's all relative and subjective... On balance, taking into account the various counter-currents, I would still be mildly more positive about the US's prospects. It's still the best looking horse at the glue factory (to quote one pundit or another).

Long-term? I'd go for a weaker JPY, given the issues the Japanese economy is facing...