For one thing, that whole Bretton Woods 3 thing is really off to an interesting start. And by interesting, I mean predictably backward. According to its loud and leading proponent, China’s yuan was supposed to be ascending while the dollar sank, its first step toward what many still claim will end up in some biblical-like abyss. Instead, CNY is doing [...]
One of the biggest intellectual crimes of the Volcker Myth is how it quashed what likely would have been fruitful (in my opinion) further examination into the monetary designs of the actual global reserve system. People today still whisper about some secret oil-soaked deal which saw UST’s end up in the hands of Arabia’s Saudis, as if this was something [...]
A full part of the inflation hysteria, the first one, was the dollar’s looming crash. The currency was, too many claimed, on the verge of collapse by late 2017, heading downward and besieged on multiple fronts by economics and politics alike. Basically, the Fed had “printed” too much “money” and the Chinese playing some “long game” were purportedly ready at [...]
On Friday I wrote: Again, the size of your reserves reflects, and is proportional to, your potential need for funding. You can’t accumulate that many unless you have a similarly arrayed “dollar short.” The bigger the stockpile the more potential for it to get out of hand if things go the wrong way (usually on the self-reinforcing cycle of rising [...]
In mainstream monetary convention, bank reserves are at the center of the monetary pyramid. They are the byproduct of any central bank policy which requires direct action. In the US system, they had been absent, however, until around 2008. The reason was the Federal Reserve’s belief that it didn’t require any change in the corresponding balance of aggregate reserves to [...]
When categorizing intuition about the real economy, it is often regarded as a combination of both structural and now cyclical problems. There was, as yet, no true recovery owing largely to factors that continue to linger beyond historical comparisons about what “should” have occurred in and after the Great Recession. Some economists refer to deleveraging especially of households as that [...]
It’s mostly accepted that what a central bank does is no more inconsistent with capitalism than what you and I do on a regular basis. There are various reasons for this self-inclusion which should be disqualified based on common sense alone, but monetary theory is, by intent, impenetrable beyond the few indoctrinated in its ritual mathematics. This isn’t to say [...]
The purpose of this exercise of examination of global funding mechanisms is to put together means for inference about the state of dollar funding as it relates to the systemic short (Part 1 here; Part 2 here). There is no direct path for observation; that is why nobody can figure out how big it is or how it has really [...]
The first part of this examination can be found here. At first, the rebound off the 2009 low looked as if there would be no lasting changes or damage to the eurodollar system, but subsequent events have shown that there is more than a little lingering dysfunction that does not sway or erase with central bank assurances (both psychological and [...]
I get so caught up in the minutiae of esoteric function or financial plumbing that it is worthwhile to take a step or two backward and review the financial system from a bit more afar. The repo market’s strain recently and even the idea of liquidity itself are actually features (or symptoms) of the “dollar.” The idea of “money supply” [...]
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