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shadow funding

If They Wish To Replace LIBOR With Repo, They Should Already Start Thinking About Repo’s Replacement

By |2017-09-18T17:00:51-04:00September 18th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Sometimes you just have to laugh. A lot has been made on the inside of LIBOR’s assumed demise. The suite of interest rates is not being discontinued really, merely relegated to the backbench. As usual, the rationale for doing so is perfectly sound: As noted by the Financial Stability Board’s Market Participants Group, there are many current uses of LIBOR [...]

August 10; Emergency Calls, Reigning Confusion, and ‘Not My Job’

By |2017-08-10T17:08:34-04:00August 10th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

In July 2012, the LIBOR manipulation scandal broke wide and before Congress then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used it to cleverly cover up for his crisis actions (more so inactions). He told the Senate Banking Committee that the LIBOR system was “structurally flawed” before intimating it had been that way for some time. Asked if the rates calculated by the [...]

Subprime Is Contained (and other notable statements declaring They Really Don’t Know What They Are Doing)

By |2017-08-09T18:44:37-04:00August 9th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress in March 2007 that subprime was contained. He will rightfully be remembered in infamy for that, but that wasn’t the most egregious example of being wrong. Even putting it in those terms risks understating the problem and why it stubbornly lingers. Being really wrong is claiming that IOER will establish [...]

The Staggering Costs

By |2017-08-09T17:52:50-04:00August 9th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Markets|

How do we measure what has been lost over the last ten years? There is no single way to calculate it, let alone a correct solution. There are so many sides to an economy that choosing one risks overstating that facet at the expense of another. It’s somewhat of an impossible task already given the staggering dimensions. If someone had [...]

You’ve Heard of Bear’s Funds, Why Not BNP’s?

By |2017-08-09T14:40:52-04:00August 9th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

When Bear Stearns nearly failed, made to merge, in March 2008 it wasn’t really a surprise. Yes, markets were shocked by the demise of the ancient firm, one of the bulge bracket cartel which suggested surprise over the severity of it more than that things were going bad. For more than a year, starting in early 2007, Bear had been [...]

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