The SBA and arrant

arrant

AR-uhnt

 Complete; thorough.

Here's a word that has had both its spelling and meaning bent out of shape from use. It's a variant of errant (wandering). Earlier the word was used in the sense of wandering or vagrant, for example, an arrant thief or an arrant knave. Over time the word began to be taken as an intensifier so an arrant fool was no longer a vagrant fool, but a complete fool.

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TIP OF THE WEEK 

Don’t be so arrant with completing IRS form 4506 with the signatures being in blue ink.

When blue ink is used to complete Form 4506-T requests, the information sometimes does not show up to the IRS.  To alleviate rejections for missing information and to better service the taxpayer the IRS is asking that the use of blue ink be discontinued immediately.

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Indices:

PRIME RATE= 3.50%

SBA LIBOR Base Rate March 2016 =3.44%

SBA Fixed Base Rate March 2016 = 4.89%

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SBA 504 Loan Debenture Rate for March

The debenture rate is only 2.50% but note rate is 2.54381% and the effective yield is 4.553%.

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AHEAD OF THE YIELD CURVE 

The Federal Reserve meets later this month.  Will they be raising interest rates?

Keep your eyes and ears tuned for this week’s release of the minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last meeting on monetary policy.

FOMC Minutes is a vital piece of information that is released three weeks to the day after the conclusion of each FOMC meeting.    Though the gist of the Fed’s official views are disclosed at the end of each FOMC meeting with a public statement, we can arrantly scrutinize details of the Fed opinions in the minutes for better understanding.

Friday afternoon the market was pricing no real probability of a rate increase at that meeting.

Eurodollar futures settle at a three- month lending rate that has averaged about 22 basis points more than the Fed's target over the past 10 years.

Here is a summary of what the market expects for Eurodollar futures based upon the pit-traded prices at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange:

APR 16- 0.63

DEC16- 0.85

DEC17- 1.06

DEC18- 1.32

DEC19- 1.58

DEC20- 1.83

DEC22- 2.24

What does all this mean?

I don’t know.

Eurodollar futures currently imply a federal funds rate that really is not going to be moving up all that much any time soon.

It is arrant nonsense that they will be raising interest rates.

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OFF BASE

Spring training is over, play ball.

The Washington Nationals closed spring training with an 18-4 record. That’s a winning percentage of .818, best in the bigs.

Big deal, you’re thinking, it’s spring training. And everybody knows that spring training results don’t matter.  Or do they?  In the past 20 years, only once has a team finished spring training with a winning percentage of .800 or better. That team? The 1997 Miami Marlins, who went 26-5 in Grapefruit League action (.839), then proceeded to win 92 regular-season games, plus another 11 in the postseason, including four in the World Series.

Of the 40 teams that have made the World Series over the past two decades, only 30 percent of them had losing records in spring training that year, and those same 40 teams had a combined winning percentage of .536 in exhibition play during their World Series seasons.

Second in Cactus League play were the Angels.

How’s that for an arrant dissection of nothing?