Financial markets and economies have a way of not standing still for very long. I sometimes think of managing money as running on a treadmill - you don't have to stop paying attention for long before you get thrown off. Relatedly, it means that sometimes these weekly write ups will age like milk. Feel free to troll me when that happens.

The constant shifting of economic conditions is why it's so important to constantly be monitoring and measuring. It's easy to fall into a compelling narrative and hold on to it way too long, well after the data has changed the story.

The first few months of the year were marked by a slowing of foreign purchases of US assets. This was a big deal. The price of all assets is set by supply and demand, and if a usual source of strong demand was drying up that would mean that prices would have to fall. The hard data was supported by the soft data - there were a slew of anecdotes about foreign institutional investors pulling back from the US. The table below from JPM shows the data, which is now available through May. As you can see, net purchases of US stocks and bonds were indeed weak (and even sometimes negative) for the first four months of the year. But May...not so much. It was the strongest month in several years.