April 18, 2007

Easy stuff!

Sir, the sequencing of economics often creates confusion. For a normal person, if the US core inflations slows down, April 18, that sounds good, so the dollar should be worth more, while if the UK core inflation goes up, April 18, that sounds bad, so the pound should weaken, but then in reality, like seems to be the case, April 18, the opposite happens. Why? Because as inflation goes down you can afford making money more available while when it is shooting up you have to make it more scarce, and investors do naturally prefer to be where their money is scarce and therefore, hopefully, counts for more in relative terms.

Now, this is only the first round since if the pounds are then not as scarce or the dollars made as available as the investors expect, then the foreign exchange movements could reverse themselves. All this ceteris-paribus which in Latin means all-things-kept-equal but that in normal slang means ignore-the-complications, and , of course, within comparable realities, as we all know there are places where money will always be utterly scarce without the investors being tempted to go there.

Now, in these circumstances, the only thing that is expected from an intelligent investor is to know where he finds himself; where the rest of the market is; what the gatekeepers the Fed and the Bank will be up to; and what other surprises, normally busts and other ugly affairs, could interfere with the way you infer things should be heading. Easy stuff!