There's an old Wall Street maxim that the cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices. As prices rise, two things will generally limit the scope of the increase. Demand will wane as consumers just use less or find substitutes. Supply will also increase as the companies that extract these raw materials open new mines, grow more crops, or [...]
This week marks a change in our economic environment or at least our perception of it. Last year, post-COVID onset, we characterized the environment as one marked by a falling dollar and improving growth. To be exact, that is the environment the markets reflected; interest rates were rising, the yield curve was steepening and the dollar was falling. That changed [...]
It was late on a Tuesday night, in the middle of last week, Christmas week of all weeks, with most people already checked out. Having finally obtained Congressional support and approval, the $900 billion plus “stimulus” (read: stipend) was on its way to becoming reality after months of politically-motivated uncertainty. Not one to sit idly by while everyone else had [...]
While things go wrong for Jay Powell in repo, they are going right in housing. Sort of. It’s more than cliché that the real estate sector is interest rate sensitive. It surely is, and much of the Fed’s monetary policy figuratively banks on it. When policymakers talk about interest rate stimulus, they largely mean the mortgage space. Homebuilders, at least, [...]
According to orthodox theory, if interest rates are falling because of term premiums then that equates to stimulus. Term premiums are what economists have invented so as to undertake Fisherian decomposition of interest rates (so that they can try to understand the bond market; as you might guess it doesn’t work any better). It is, they claim, the additional premium [...]
Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before Congress on May 22, 2013, that taper was for officials a strong consideration. Though QE4, the UST portion of the restored balance sheet expansion, wasn’t yet six months old and he had promised, sort of, at the start of QE3 that both would be open-ended, sort of, his message to the legislature was [...]
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