If there was a compelling collateral case for bending the Treasury yield curve toward inversion beginning last October, what follows is the update for the twist itself. As collateral scarcity became shortage then a pretty substantial run, that was the very moment yield curve flattening became inverted.Just like October, you can actually see it all unfold.According to the latest FRBNY [...]
Before the repo rumble this week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell wanted to coast into a second rate cut on the comforting breeze of his insurance rhetoric. No longer one and done, that’s done, a second straight cut would be more consistent with a more forceful yet unnecessary policy response. Again, his publicly stated view is that the US needs [...]
At one time, economics actually cared about eurodollars. Maybe it was because the thing was so new, it was a hot, sexy topic, the kind of strange and unusual deviation from the norm that can grasp someone’s attention and hold it. Perhaps it was the way in which it all began, an entire monetary system clandestinely sorted together out of [...]
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) reports that total gross notional derivatives contracts owned and outstanding by domestic banks rose for the second straight quarter. The OCC statistics are one quarter behind, meaning that though banks themselves are reporting Q3 numbers with earnings all figures shown here are from the official compilation for Q2. As such, the [...]
The price of oil can’t seem to climb out of the $40’s despite a lot going for it at the moment. Oil prices matter right now as much as three years ago when they signaled serious trouble ahead. For them to get above $50 and then continue on would indicate for a lot of important places what everyone has expected [...]
Closing the book on Q4 2016 balance sheet capacity is to review essentially forex volumes. The eurodollar system over the last ten years has turned far more in this direction in addition to it becoming more Asian/Japanese. In fact, the two really go hand in hand given the native situation of Japanese banks. As expected, data compiled by the Office [...]
When the Treasury Department released its Treasury International Capital (TIC) data for December, what was a somewhat obscure report suddenly found mainstream attention. Private foreign investors had sold tens of billions in US securities primarily US Treasury bonds and notes which the media then made into some kind of warning to then-incoming President Trump. It was supposed to be a [...]
If there has been a lot different about the past few months, it was reflected in the TIC figures and then some. What is usually pretty easy to decipher, there were instead all sorts of shifts across the most important categories. For one, the foreign official sector was busy in December buying up UST’s and dollar assets just as the [...]
Economists have always fashioned themselves in the style of physicists. They endlessly scrawl incomprehensible equations on blackboards because it is the epitome of science, the allure of great intelligence seemingly to do great things. But where physicists have continued to describe and solve some of the world’s great mysteries, Economists only bungle. They described free trade from among the myriad [...]
Earlier this week Bloomberg published an absurd story trying to claim that Donald Trump is being warned by foreign holders of US debt. Warned about what, the article didn’t say, so we can reasonably speculate (unlike the article) it was about politics. Bloomberg never did seem to report any such spreading alarm throughout the last Obama years even though selling [...]
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