In all honesty, I do mean to beat this one particular dead horse. In fact, I intend to pulverize it until there is nothing left but the smallest particulate matter. This is everything that is wrong with how things are right now. Either they are willing to put out what could only be legitimately classified as outright propaganda (lies), or [...]
Some things are not supposed to be innovative. It’s no surprise that given the high technology of our modern lives that modern humans tend to be drawn to the new and shiny. We’ve marked the advance of society along the lines of big leaps in understanding and doing. Quite easily, we can get lost equating the two, thinking every innovation [...]
We’ve noted over the past few weeks just how much things have changed since earlier this year. We started off 2018 in the grips of inflation hysteria, the more extreme corollary to globally synchronized growth. Things were going to be so good, they said, it would be bad. Now there’s just growing worries about only bad. In some cases, these [...]
The Bank of Japan gathered its policymaking members in Tokyo at the end of last week. The statements released and the commentary given pursuant to it exuded a renewed darkness. When they had last met on April 26 and 27, things were already different. But the conclave before that, March 8 and 9, they were practically giddy. What a difference [...]
As anticipated, the FOMC voted on both proposals in front of it. There should only be the one, but even routine monetary policy no longer is. Alan Greenspan’s Fed charged ahead with seventeen consecutive moves (the last few completed under Ben Bernanke) with little discussion about uncertainty in the economy (though there was, conundrums and all) let alone in the [...]
The FOMC is almost certainly going to raise the federal funds corridor today. The only question is whether IOER and RRP will go up by the same amount. The issue with federal funds as an offshoot or reverberation of what really matters (offshore) should take center stage, but it won’t. Instead, the Committee will pretend this is about wages. They [...]
When you go around claiming that central bankers don’t know the first thing about money, people tend to think you are crazy. It’s not really their (people’s) fault. Not only have we been conditioned to believe in a technocracy of sorts, it is raw human nature to immediately suspect such a radically contrarian view. It would be one thing to [...]
I believe if you were to ask most people their definition of the worst economic case, they would respond with some description of a crash. An exceedingly large contraction that spares practically no one, destroying much in its path. Like what followed 1929, that would seem to qualify. It’s why we spend so much time going back to 2008. That [...]
Since nobody can seem to agree on what is an asset bubble, it’s that much more difficult to try and estimate its end. A bubble stops being a bubble only when the people participating decide to question the rationalizations they’ve invented to keep them complacently inside of it. It’s most often just that vague sense the world isn’t turning out [...]
Back in February, Japan’s Cabinet Office reported that Real GDP in Japan had grown in Q4 2017 for the eighth consecutive quarter. It was the longest streak of non-negative GDP since the 1980’s. Predictably, this was hailed as some significant achievement, a true masterstroke of courage and perseverance. It was taken as a sign that Abenomics and QQE was finally [...]
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