This particular part of the hysteria is understandable, if thoroughly unconvincing. Forget the Fed and its bank reserves for moment, whatever those are now and then. The banking system is where it’s at, monetarily speaking, and it is the banking system which seems to have lost its handle on the money printing lever. If we’re focused beyond bank reserves and [...]
When people accuse the Federal Reserve of anything when it comes to inflation, they say the central bank is cooking the books to hide it. Back in 2000, for example, monetary observers were aflutter as policymakers shifted away from the CPI and to the PCE Deflator as their ultimate standard for broad consumer price behavior. The bastards, the latter widely [...]
It has been an unbelievably busy week on many fronts. Overshadowed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Austrian elections was continued “dollar” deterioration in FX. Further down the line than that, though in many respects related to it, was the UK government announcing the disappearance of half a trillion pounds. The news didn’t make much imprint in America, but it [...]
The Federal Reserve updated the Financial Accounts of the United States (Z1) yesterday, meaning there is quite a lot of new data for the second quarter of 2017. It also means more than just that update, as each quarterly addition is often accompanied by revisions to past estimates. There were some substantial downward revisions to things like Corporate Net Worth, [...]
When the Mario Draghi as head of the ECB first introduced negative rates in early June 2014, his reasoning was very clear. As he said in the opening of his statement imposing NIRP on Europe, “Today, we decided on a combination of measures to provide additional monetary policy accommodation and to support lending to the real economy.” The way in [...]
There was a funny sort of Congressional exchange all the way back in November 2005 that in a weird way defines our world today. At the nomination proceedings on whether to confirm Ben Bernanke as Alan Greenspan’s successor, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky wanted the prospective Fed Chairman to first answer for M3. It had become something of a conspiracy [...]
Europe has not been left out of the “reflation” trend, with some seemingly good news having been reported recently. Inflation has ticked up to the highest in three years. The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the Euro Area was 1.1% in December 2016, year-over-year, the first measure above 1% since September 2013. It is easy to see oil [...]
When life gives you lemons you intend to make lemonade, but in days long gone they often had to make due only with what was on hand. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries were by pure accident, though I doubt many (or any) were as plain unsanitary as Hennig Brand’s discovery. He had been looking to find gold in urine, [...]
When I started in this business more than twenty years ago, I fully expected to be a profession investor in the purest sense of the term. I envisioned spending my days tearing apart corporate financials, especially balance sheets, and matching them to common sense expectations of new products and imaginative advances. It was the 1990’s, after all, and everything seemed [...]
Part 1 can be found here Long before Bear Stearns, there was Countrywide and a glimpse into the yawning abyss. But there was also Northern Rock, a UK bank, and a series of tremors and earthquakes rumbling across Germany. It was an entirely surreal period, as the once-mighty German system ground to a spectacular halt on, of all things, US [...]
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