SGM-FX insights

Walking the Warsh The key event of the 2026 Jackson Hole Symposium was undoubtedly Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh’s Speech on Friday afternoon. We wrote this week on just how desperate the market was to hear from the Fed Chair about how his central bank would tackle the challenge of persistently rising inflation. There was certainly […]

Lego Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter, started making wooden ladders and ironing boards in 1932 and that phase lasted until 1947 when the company bought its first plastic injection moulding machine that enabled it to turn out tiny plastic bricks. The popularity of Lego for children in the pre-electronic age is well known but Lego […]

(Not) What Warsh Wants The unequivocal focus of yesterday’s trading session was the deluge of data at 13:30 BST from the United States. The data included growth as well as price-level statistics, notably with the inclusion of the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation: Core PCE. Before we dive into yesterday’s data, let’s recap the economic […]

French Presidential election It may be 8 months away but pulses are beginning to race as France contemplates, well France, beyond Emmanuel Macron. The leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI) who embraces a heady cocktail of left-wing populism, radical socialism, eco-socialism and democratic republicanism is riding high in the polls but as […]

Trade Battle Leading up to last week, there had been a binary risk event priced into the Canadian Dollar. That event regarded US-Canadian tariffs and specifically, whether an agreement could be reached during negotiations to prevent tariffs being imposed by the United States on imports of Canadian goods. The initial deadline was extended by POTUS […]

China An excellent Economist magazine analysis of China’s energy pivot last weekend describes it as an electrostate as opposed to the USA under President Trump which is a petrostate. The former is focused on alternative energy and its oil buying strategy while the latter is not only fixated on pumping oil but on stopping offshore […]

US Dollar There is a case that can be made for a weaker USD but it is by no means a compelling one. Consumer purchasing and softer employment data reduce the case for higher interest rates. Federal policy uncertainty and Chair Warsh’s rocky start on articulating that policy also threaten USD. Against that there is […]

Long-end surprise Whilst markets continue to endure a stalemate on the macro economy’s most poignant issues, implied volatility has continued to drift lower. In the early hours of yesterday morning, President Trump kicked the can a little further down the road with respect to tariffs on Canadian goods and markets continued to look for signs […]

Africa In case you doubt the resolve behind China’s inexorable advance across Africa, focus for a moment on CHIPS Or China’s Cross Border International Payments System which is the Chinese equivalent of the international payments system SWIFT or Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) system. Countries including Libya, Angola, and Kenya as well as […]

Data driven decline There have been episodes in recent memory where, albeit fleetingly, the Eurozone economy has been perceived to relatively outperform versus the US economy. Those periods have often been short-lived with macroeconomic risks tending to have driven investors back towards the dollar despite changing fundamentals. Following weak data in the US last week, […]

UK Growth The Rachel Reeves growth legacy: she and her de-fenestrated UK Government Cabinet colleagues have been expounding on their success and discouraging the new Cabinet from destroying it by announcing the type of new spending measures trotted out by PM Andy Burnham in his first heady fortnight. There are a couple of things here: […]

IEA v OPEC Normally there is some sort of consensus among economic forecasters in the same field – in this case oil, but when it comes to Oil consumption in 2026, the Paris based IEA sees a contraction of 1.6 million barrels per day due to supply constraints from the closure of the Strait of […]