If I had to pick a 'chart of the week' I would be tempted by this one.
Don't forget it was the bond market that first signaled worry about omicron and that hasn't let up. Of course, mixed in with that is worry about Fed policy and the stringent hawkish shift from Powell and other FOMC members.
That's tough to disaggregate but this chart isn't. It shows 10-year yields challenging the trend since August 2020 when they formed a double bottom off of the closing low from March 2020 and began a long rise that's been consolidating for 9 months.
A fall through the uptrend would threaten the August lows, which came at the time of peak worries about delta. Oil has already tested those lows and if we get signs of a global coordinated rise in omicron cases, we could easily get back there or (*gulp*) worse.
Everyone wants this pandemic to end yesterday but it's beginning to look like omicron is significantly more transmissible than delta. That could turn out to be dead wrong but the positive case right now is that it leads to less severe outcomes. So it could outcompete delta and run through the global population without too much damage, especially for the vaccinated.
At the same time, we have to guard against wishful thinking so a chart like this provides a great way to manage risk.
In terms of the transmissibility, here's a good thread outlining the recent data and comparing it to delta. The takeaway is that it's looking to be twice as easy to transmit. It would seem to me that will make it impossible for China to contain but I would have said that about the delta variant too.
As the Omicron epidemic continues to expand in South Africa and as case counts and sequencing data continues to come in, we can better estimate the current transmission rate of Omicron. 1/19
— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) December 4, 2021
