It wouldn’t be Euro$ #5 without perhaps the last of its rituals completed: the mainstream downgrades. Go back in time to each of the prior episodes, markets change, the data inflects, and then only later do surprised, shocked Economists at whichever establishment outpost begin to recalculate their DSGE outputs. Every time.Way back in 2015, it took the IMF’s semi-annual World [...]
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: About US$275 billion (about SDR 193 billion) of the new allocation will go to emerging markets and developing countries, including low-income countries. This from the IMF’s July 30, 2021, statement gleefully announcing its governing body(ies) has(d) agreed to a general allocation of $650 billion in SDR’s, biggest in history, according to existing quotas. [...]
The Salvadoran colón is still technically legal tender in El Salvador. The country’s government under President Francisco Flores had passed the Law of Monetary Integration in 2000, taking effect on January 1, 2001. This legalization of the US dollar for domestic circulation didn’t specifically remove the colón from common purchases or prohibit its use; the country’s Central Reserve Bank just [...]
Brazil’s Minister of Economy Paulo Geudes told members of the local press last month that the country was on track to lose about 300,000 “formal” jobs in 2020. Though employment growth has slowed there in the second half of the year, as it has worldwide, Geudes was quite proud of his achievement. After all, though hundreds of thousands of Brazilians [...]
Who would’ve ever guessed? Jay Powell flooded the world with dollars, “overseas” swaps and all, but more and more you get the impression he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. The Fed Chairman, of course, is never alone when it comes to these things. He’s plenty of company.Recall, for a moment, how the IMF in June 2018 “rescued” Argentina. Big, [...]
Back in late July, the government of Ecuador opened negotiations with a particular set of what it called institutional bondholders. Like so many other nations, every other nation, Ecuador needs dollars and borrows them from global markets. Eurodollars, as in directly bank loans, those have been harder to come by post-2013. Eurobonds, however, they’ve been somewhat of a different story [...]
It’s no wonder we’re obsessed with shoes these days. Even the V-people, as I’ll call them, keep one wary eye glued looking behind them. Survivor’s euphoria means a lot of potentially bad things, only beginning with a false sense of survivor-hood. We’ve so far made through only one big test, there are likely more to follow. And if they do, [...]
When Argentina requested, and received, a ~$50 billion bailout from the IMF in mid-2018 it was a total shock (to those who follow only central bankers and Economists when it comes to anything, though especially relating to the global dollar system). The platitudes were issued alongside standby financing which lasted only a couple of months before the stricken country pleaded [...]
Saudi Arabia once burned through the bond market on par with demand for Argentina’s paper. During the 2016-17 globally synchronized growth-inspire Eurobond binge, the country made up for its lost oil revenues (oil crash and all) with dollar-denominated, offshore debt flotations. These merely stabilized the country’s forex reserves after they had collapsed (by a third) alongside benchmark Brent crude prices [...]
It’s actually pretty easy to see why the IMF is in a hurry to secure more resources. I’m not talking about potential bailout candidates banging down the doors; that’s already happened. The fund itself is doing two contradictory things simultaneously: telling the world, repeatedly, that it has a highly encouraging $1 trillion in bailout capacity at the same time it [...]
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