Israeli Strike on Gaza City Kills One Palestinian as Constant IDF Ceasefire Violations Continue

Core Durables Goods Surge For 12th Straight Month, Push Bond Yield Higher After a recent string of 'soft' survey data, this morning we get some 'hard' data and it was far stronger than expected. Preliminary headline durable goods orders for March rose 0.8% MoM (better than the 0.5% MoM exp), and the first increase after a three month decline to start the year (which was the first 3-month decline since Nov 2019). The increase took place despite continued weakness in aircraft orders manifesting as a 21.1% drop in nondefense aircraft and parts...

Apple Price Shock: Macs And iPads Jump $200 Or More As Memory Crisis Worsens Readers were warned as early as late January to front-run the coming memory shortage by purchasing their favorite electronics, whether PCs, laptops, TVs, smartphones, or anything else dependent on high-end memory chips, as unprecedented data-center demand was already beginning to emerge. Fast forward nearly five months, and just two weeks after Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that "price increases are unavoidable" for laptops and other devices, a Wall Street Journal report has confirmed that those hikes have...

Is The Iran War Good For The Petrodollar? Diana Choyleva wrote an excellent editorial for the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Iran War Is A Boon For The Petrodollar.” She pushes back against claims that the Iran conflict is accelerating the death of the petrodollar. Instead, RealInvestmentAdvice.com points out that she argues the opposite: between Iran and Venezuela, the U.S. is defending and bolstering dollar dominance in the oil trade. The 75-year-old petrodollar system rests on oil being priced and traded in dollars, which keeps the dollar prominent in all global trade. China has...