When Japan’s Ministry of Trade, Economy, and Industry (METI) reported earlier in November that Japanese Industrial Production (IP) had plunged again during the month of September 2021, it was so easy to just dismiss the decline as a product of delta COVID. According to these figures, industrial output fell an unsightly 5.4%...from August 2021, meaning month-over-month not year-over-year. Altogether, IP [...]
Do the similarities outweigh the differences? We better hope not. There is a lot about 2021 that is shaping up in the same way as 2018 had (with a splash of 2013 thrown in for disgust). Guaranteed inflation, interest rates have nowhere to go but up, and a certified rocking recovery restoring worldwide potential. So said all in the media, [...]
You don’t have to take my word for it. QE doesn’t work and it never has. That’s not just my assessment, pull out any chart of interest rates for wherever gets the misfortune of having been wasted with one of these LSAP’s. If none handy, then just read what officials and central bankers write about their own programs (or those [...]
Forgotten now, overridden by the arrival of the coronavirus, Germany’s economy was already well into recession before COVID. Quite a long time before. It wasn’t an earth-shattering collapse reaching downward to an incredible depth, that became the later effect of overreacting to the pandemic. We will simply never know what that prior contraction would have looked like, and how bad [...]
The first half of 2021 was inundated with government helicopters, more QE’s, and then CPI’s put up with guarantees the “inflation” was going to continue for a long time. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s often hapless CEO, proudly declared US Treasuries beyond the touch of any 10-foot pole. With the economy on fire, he “reasoned”, who would ever want safe and [...]
With so little to like about Japan’s own economy, the Japanese long ago had come to count on putting their money and their efforts elsewhere. General fortune has therefore become a product of eurodollar fickleness; reflation in the global monetary system “allows” Japan a bit of additional breathing room. The economy picks up and confuses central bankers and Economists alike [...]
How often do you check your brokerage account? There is a famous economics paper from 1997, written by some of the giants in behavioral finance (Thaler, Kahnemann, Tversky & Schwartz), that tested what is known as myopic loss aversion. What they found was that investors who check their performance less frequently are more willing to take risk and experience higher [...]
Central banks and their staffs have long been accused of trying to hide inflation. This allegation had been a staple of their critics, those charging reckless monetary policies for creating “too much” money that had allegedly been causing price imbalances all over the financial map. The most famous example the Federal Reserve discontinuing M3 early in 2006 – just as [...]
The first seeds of the eventual eurodollar bloom, in domestic US terms, were sown all way back in sixteen – as in the year 1916. Believe it or not, the Federal Reserve Act, then only a few years old, had been modified so that banking syndicates (those able to raise the princely sum of $1 million capital) could form what [...]
As another central bank, the Federal Reserve, seriously contemplates tapering its latest QE, its policymaking members would do well to consider the several others who either did or thought they should. One of them, obviously, the same Fed but back in 2013. Another was the Bank of Japan early in 2018.It was March that year and “monetary” officials gathering around [...]
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