Education
Plain-English guides to the frameworks behind the analysis.
Every market analysis note in our research thread relies on a framework: OIS, term premium, the dollar smile, COT positioning, the Beveridge curve, the SEP. Here is the reference shelf. Each piece teaches the math, names the gotchas, and points back at the analysis where the framework is being applied today.
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A plain-English guide to the Taylor rule.
The published policy rule that benchmarks the federal funds rate against inflation and the output gap, the four parameter choices that matter, what the rule recommends today against the 3.4% core PCE print, and why Warsh has hinted the next framework may make explicit reference to it.
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A plain-English guide to nowcasting.
How the Cleveland Fed inflation nowcast and the Atlanta Fed GDPNow models work, what daily inputs feed them, why they tend to beat consensus forecasts by 30-40bp on release day, and how to read them against the upcoming print.
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A plain-English guide to the oil market.
Brent vs WTI, the curve structure (contango vs backwardation), what OPEC+ actually controls and what it doesn’t, the geopolitical-premium overlay, and why a $73 print after a $93 peak is the cleanest single read of the Iran de-escalation flow.
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A plain-English guide to central bank FX reserves.
What "war chest" means in practice: the $1.3 trillion Japan holds, how it is composed, what fraction is actually deployable for intervention, and the constraints that make the headline number misleading.
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A plain-English guide to real yields.
How a real yield is defined (nominal minus breakeven), the difference between TIPS-derived and survey-derived measures, why real yields drive FX more than nominal yields, and where the current US 10-year real yield at roughly 2.0% places the dollar regime.
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A plain-English guide to the carry trade.
How a carry trade is constructed, the math behind the yield differential and the FX-volatility cost, why USD/JPY is the canonical example, and the historical pattern of why carry trades end (rate convergence, vol spike, or intervention).
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A plain-English guide to monetary policy frameworks.
What a "framework" actually is, the 2020 FAIT regime and why it lasted only five years, the alternatives (Taylor rule, price-level targeting, NGDP targeting), and what Warsh’s "not well suited" comment yesterday tells us about where the framework review is headed.
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A plain-English guide to financial conditions indices.
How the Goldman, Chicago Fed, and Bloomberg FCIs are built, why the Fed treats them as the policy-transmission channel, and what a 50-basis-point move in the index actually does to real-economy outcomes.
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A plain-English guide to forward guidance.
How the Fed communicates intent through statement language, the SEP, and the press conference, the four eras of guidance (qualitative, calendar, threshold, state-contingent), and the language hooks markets actually trade.
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A plain-English guide to r-star, the neutral rate.
What r-star actually is, the three models (Laubach-Williams, Holston-Laubach-Williams, Lubik-Matthes) that estimate it, why the longer-run dot is essentially r-star plus 2 percent, and why Warsh’s drift on this number is the most durable signal in the SEP.
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A plain-English guide to inflation expectations surveys.
The four surveys central banks watch — Michigan, NY Fed SCE, the Conference Board, and the SPF — what each one asks, why the Fed weights them differently, and the "anchored vs unmoored" framing that today’s Michigan long-run jump just put on the table.
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A plain-English guide to CPI components and the supercore.
The four categories that make up the CPI basket, the OER trick that makes shelter dominate the index, why the "supercore" (services ex-housing) is the cleanest demand read, and the math behind the sub-component weights.
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A plain-English guide to inflation breakevens.
How TIPS-vs-nominal gives you a market-implied inflation expectation in one number, why the 5y5y forward is the cleanest read of long-run anchoring, and the construction math behind both, written for the CPI Wednesday and the SEP in two weeks.
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A plain-English guide to the SEP and the dot plot.
What the Summary of Economic Projections actually is, how the dot plot is assembled, the difference between the median dot and the consensus call, and why Warsh’s first SEP at the 16-17 June meeting is the most-watched piece of paper of the year.
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A plain-English guide to the NFP report.
Two surveys, one release: the establishment survey that counts jobs, the household survey that counts people, the birth-death model that adjusts for new firms, and the benchmark revisions that quietly rewrite the picture once a year.
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A plain-English guide to FX intervention.
When Japan’s MoF actually steps in, the difference between verbal and actual intervention, the 2022 and 2024 precedents, and what to watch in the price action around USD/JPY 160.
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A plain-English guide to ADP vs nonfarm payrolls.
Two payroll measures, three structural differences, and the rule of thumb that lets you translate an ADP surprise into an expected NFP reaction. The math behind why they diverge by 100k or more in a single month.
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A plain-English guide to the Beveridge curve.
The vacancy-unemployment relationship that sits behind every JOLTS release, the post-pandemic outward shift and what is reversing it, and the u* = √(uv) shorthand for reading the curve in one line.
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A plain-English guide to economic surprise indices.
How the Citigroup CESI is built, why FX desks watch it more than the prints themselves, and the math behind translating an upside ISM into the index move it produces.
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A plain-English guide to PCE vs CPI.
Why the Fed reads PCE instead of CPI, what the trimmed-mean variant adds (and why the new Chair prefers it), and how to translate a print in one measure into the other.
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A plain-English guide to the dollar smile.
Stephen Jen’s three-regime framework for the dollar, the math behind the smile shape, and where DXY actually sits today between left-side risk-off, middle-trough underperformance, and right-side US exceptionalism.
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A plain-English guide to the term premium.
Decomposing a 10-year Treasury yield into the expected path of policy and the term premium, the math from the ACM model, and why the bucket has gone from deeply negative to firmly positive in this cycle.
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A plain-English guide to COT positioning, with corn as the case.
How the CFTC Commitments of Traders report is built, the math that turns a raw net-long number into a percentile, and what May’s corn print is saying about a crowded long.
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A plain-English guide to currency correlations.
What the correlation between two markets measures, how to compute it in five lines of arithmetic, and the one cell of today’s dollar matrix that’s gone the wrong way.
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A plain-English guide to OIS.
What overnight-index swaps measure, what they do not, and how to read them against fed-funds futures.
Reference pieces are evergreen. They update when a framework meaningfully changes, not on a calendar. The Atom feed covers both analysis and reference releases.