Episode 755: The DC Today - Thursday, December 7, 2023

Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/4abzegh

The market opened up a handful of points this morning and slowly built on gains for most of the day. After a big move lower across the curve in yields this week we took a bit of a breather today with a flat 10YR up two basis points at 4.14%. Stay tuned for a three handle on 10’s.

We are starting to see this market rally broaden out with the equal weight version of the SP500 breaking away from the market cap weighted index. This is showing the average stock starting to participate more in this rally outside of technology names, which I find constructive. Both large cap and regional banks by the way are back to where they were pre SVB failure earlier in the year. Part as a normalization of stress in the financials and part for a 2024 line up that could favor the banks if we get better net interest margins as the yield curve potentially normalizes with the short end moving down. This is something we have seen before; late cycle rally in financials as the Fed pauses and ultimately cuts the following year (95’/96′ comes to mind).

Monthly financial obligations for consumers like auto payments and home payments, as a percentage of household cash, are on the rise and now at 16%. Interesting however that even with such a rise in rates these are still actually below pre-pandemic levels which was closer to 18%. Higher rates just haven’t bit as hard as years past with such a prolonged low rate refinancing period the years preceding it.

Links mentioned in this episode: TheDCToday.com DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com