Special Note: I'm in Miami this week, a mix of business and personal. I lived here for 30 years and we raised our family here but we moved to South Carolina a little over 3 years ago because we were tired of the traffic and, more than that, the irritability that comes with so many people crammed into such a [...]
This Fed report is meant to be a broad assessment of financial system stability. It's purpose is transparency in an attempt to identify vulnerabilities in the system not to try to identify areas for possible shocks. It looks at 4 broad categories and how they interact. Asset Price Valuation Household and Business Borrowing (Level) Financial Sector Leverage (Level) Funding (Current [...]
Every time we hear, watch, or read the news, we are reminded that liberty is a rare commodity in this world. - Ronald Reagan It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God such men lived. - George S. Patton In the End, we will remember not the words of our [...]
April 15th was the two-week anniversary of the day my wife and I got our second Moderna shot. We have spent the last 13 months being very careful about the virus, limiting our contacts, social distancing, and generally doing anything that seemed helpful. I am certainly aware that others took a more liberal attitude as is their right. But, for [...]
Between November 1998 and February 1999, Japan’s government bond (JGB) market was utterly decimated. You want to find an historical example of a real bond rout (no caps nor exclamations necessary), take a look at what happened during those three exhilarating (if you were a government official) months. The JGB 10-year yield had dropped to a low of just 77.2 [...]
The Chinese simply did what every Economics textbook currently in print says you are supposed to do. When confronted with a downturn, no matter its size you borrow your way through it. In fact, it says the greater the contraction the more you need to lean on finance. The neo-Keynesian model is unyielding on the matter. Using debt to boost [...]
One of main elements of the true seasonal Q1 weakness, or what has been called residual seasonality, has been the embrace of revolving credit. The Federal Reserve’s statistics for consumer credit over the last two years has displayed a pronounced trend, especially at the end of last year. Americans had, it seemed, made heavy use of credit cards (and other [...]
This week the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release updated estimates for Q2 GDP as well as Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) and Personal Incomes for July. Accompanying those latter two accounts is the currently preferred inflation standard for the US economy. The PCE Deflator finally hit 2% and in two consecutive months, after revisions, earlier this year. The inability of [...]
What was it that touched off CNY’s devaluation in the first place? When it started, “unexpectedly” of course, it was described as intentional policy designed to thwart speculators betting too heavily on the currency’s continued rise. But the first major move in the chess game between the PBOC and “whatever” it is driving the currency was to widen the daily [...]
It is surely one of the primary reasons why many if not most people have so much trouble accepting the trouble the economy is in. With record high stock prices leading to record levels of household net worth, it seems utterly inconsistent to claim those facts against a US economic depression. Weakness might be more easily believed as some overseas [...]
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