The Asians are selling their Treasuries again, which can only mean one thing. The mainstream media will offer all sorts of explanations as to why that might be and not a single one will be correct. China and Japan are offloading US$ assets primarily federal government debt for vastly different reasons. Their decisions spring from the same source, but Japan’s [...]
It was for a time a somewhat curious dilemma. When it rains it pours, they always say, and for China toward the end of 2015 it was a real cloudburst. The Chinese economy was slowing, dangerous deflation developing around an economy captured by an unseen anchor intent on causing havoc and destruction. At the same time, consumer prices were jumping [...]
Whether or not any central banker chooses to appreciate the fact, money is an important economic tool. Before it ever gets to be a store of value, there has to be some correct supply so as to become a medium of exchange (and almost by virtue a unit of account). The problem throughout history has been to foresee and then [...]
Sometimes it pays to wait. Better to be sure than premature. In January 2014, the journal Central Banking handed out its inaugural awards. Among the recipients was Paul Volcker who was bestowed a lifetime achievement prize. The initial Governor of the Year honorific, something like a central banker MVP, went to Mario Draghi of the ECB. He graciously accepted in [...]
Since the announced conditional cut in China’s RRR won’t begin to show up in various figures (particularly for the MLF) until next month, the updated PBOC balance sheet for March 2018 is somewhat anti-climactic. Not only is it too early for what may follow given the policy shift, there are the usual if not more than usual Golden Week distortions [...]
When we look back at the period known as the Great Inflation there is a tendency, I believe, to truncate the episode only to the most well-known parts. What many people remember are things like gas lines, where oil problems and embargoes left Americans at several points in the seventies too often stuck for trying fill up their autos (or [...]
It's actually quite difficult to answer the question posed in the title, which in itself is a clue. What we know for sure is what does not count as reserves for a non-reservable currency system. It's that contradiction that sets off the often graphic misconceptions. Quantitative easing has been described as printing money. That’s certainly what central banks wish for [...]
There is a difference between reflation and recovery. The terms are similar and relate to the same things, but in many ways the latter requires first the former. To get to recovery, the economy must reflate if in contraction it was beaten down in money as well as cyclical forces. In the Great Crash of 1929 and after, reflation was [...]
How many little pieces of conventional wisdom never hold up to scrutiny? Things get repeated over and over until they are so common that no one ever stops and thinks about them. It isn’t really nefarious like the Big Lie, more just shorthand that may have made perfect sense at one time but has become anachronistically handicapped as the world [...]
What makes a stock bubble is really two parts. Most people might think those two parts are money and mania, but actually money supply plays no direct role. Perceptions about money do, even if mistaken as to what really takes place monetarily from time to time. In fact, for a bubble that would make sense; people are betting in stocks [...]
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