Brexit, Trump’s election, even the Bank of Japan rumored to be thinking helicopter. Last year was the year of thinking differently and therein was hope. No matter how many times some markets and especially media blindly accepted the “stimulus” or “recovery” judgments of economists over the years, by 2016 and the near-recession globally that accompanied a “rising dollar” that nobody [...]
The economy was sailing along into its Hollywood sunset in 2014 before it was rudely interrupted by the “rising dollar.” At first, the mainstream narrative was that a higher dollar exchange was a good thing, an indication that global markets were embracing the economic revival; or, if you didn’t quite want to get that optimistic, it at least signaled the [...]
Almost exactly ten years later, central bankers believe they are so very close now to the end of the crisis. It doesn’t matter that they have made the same claim before, this time is different they say. Global growth is finally synchronized, and all the policy clocks can strike normal, or what passes for normal, almost all at once. There’s [...]
The entry of the United States into World War I placed a heavy financial burden on the government. The scale of such encumbrance was at the time almost unthinkable, and today is incomprehensible. Federal government expenditures in 1916 were all of $734 million, with $125 million financed by the new income tax authorized a few years prior by the 16th [...]
Updated statistics from the People’s Bank of China shed some light on changing money conditions in RMB. The Big 4 State-owned banks have been the primary liquidity conduit for all policies and activities going back to 2014. These institutions had been since the middle of 2016 increasingly squeezed as to excess funding available to be forwarded into money markets. This [...]
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 [...]
On June 27, ECB President Mario Draghi opened that central bank’s international conference in Sintra, Portugal. Most media never made it past the first two sentences of his prepared remarks. For them, the verdict was already delivered in those few lines. They declared that Draghi declared monetary policy was working and the world was on its way at long last. [...]
There are four basic categories to the PBOC’s balance sheet, two each on the asset and liability sides of the ledger. The latter is the money side, composed mainly of actual, physical currency and the ledger balances of bank reserves. Opposing them is forex assets in possession of the central bank and everything else denominated in RMB. Because liabilities need [...]
Suddenly central banks are mesmerized by yield curves. One of the jokes around this place is that economists just don’t get the bond market. If it was only a joke. Alan Greenspan’s “conundrum” more than a decade ago wasn’t the end of the matter but merely the beginning. After spending almost the entire time in between then and now on [...]
On March 24, 2009, then US President Barack Obama gave a prime time televised press conference whose subject was quite obviously the economy and markets. The US and global economy was at that moment trying to work through the worst conditions since the 1930’s and nobody really had any idea what that would mean. As President, Obama’s main task was [...]
Stay In Touch