The Bank of Japan shouted down the debt laden economy on Thursday evening in the US. Following Europe’s precedent, they took interest rates on a certain segment of bank assets negative. News flash: Asset prices rise from a small change in investor asset preference, nothing else is expected to change. Where’s this all heading? When doing scenario analysis, I think [...]
At what point do we accede back to logic and rational thought? The Bank of Japan is “forced”, not my word, to unleash negative nominal interest rates and that is taken as a positive for everyone everywhere. Such a move is, without question, an open admission that QQE failed and failed spectacularly (since it was even expanded not really that [...]
It wasn’t supposed to be the case that China would steal all the attention from Japan. We are only a few days away from QQE’s second anniversary and all expectations were purposely set to be a full-blown revival by now. The dedication and skill with which the Japanese economy was handled was meant to conclusively demonstrate with no debate that [...]
Japan is undoubtedly now quite the mess, but that is starting to spill-over into general view in what has to be a most unwelcome and even embarrassing occurrence for its practitioners. The problem, however, is much deeper now than just an economy seemingly forever doomed to the recesses of some kind of economic hell. For a quadrillion yen, the Bank [...]
With the yen precipitating levels not seen since the very week Lehman collapsed and finally confirmed just how global the crisis was (and would remain), “markets” in Japan and everywhere have begun to “anticipate” (beg?) even more. The yen briefly touched (devalued) 107 to the US$, a remarkable run that threatens to even further upend the now-very weakened state inside [...]
I think it is very clear that the Bank of Japan is becoming more and more sensitive to swings in the Japanese stock market. Policy pronouncements, toothless as they usually are, seem to correlate very well with downturns in stock prices. Perhaps some of the Federal Reserve literature is making its way East. There were no doubts, none whatsoever, last [...]
Whether it has been the American version or that pioneered by the Bank of Japan, QE is first and foremost an experiment in psychological manipulation. All central banks derive most of their “authority” from moral suasion, that old textbook “axiom” of getting market participants to act in the manner in which you only threaten. QE is different in that it [...]
The Federal Reserve on a few separate occasions, as I noted late last week, has begun to peremptorily quash the growing use of the loaded word “bubble”. From academic papers to Fed speeches, US monetary policymakers want to make sure that investors and the public know they are watching for them though they have yet to appear. Vigilance is paired [...]
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