I’ve said since it first showed up on December 1 to keep the eurodollar futures curve in the back of your mind. It wasn’t likely to change all that much in its first stage of minor inversion. The mere fact it had gone upside down at all regardless of where on the curve or by how much was already a [...]
Why always round numbers? Monetary policy targets in the post-Volcker era always change on even terms. Alan Greenspan had his quarter-point fed funds moves. Ben Bernanke faced with crisis would auction $25 billion via TAF. QE’s are done in even numbers, either total purchases or their monthly pace.This is a messy and dynamic environment, in which the economy operates out [...]
A momentous day, for sure, but one lost in what would turn out to be a seemingly endless sea of them. October 8, 2008, right in the thick of the world’s first global financial crisis (how could it have been global, surely not subprime mortgages?) the Federal Reserve took center stage; or tried to. Having bungled Lehman, botched AIG, and [...]
I knew long before they came out that it was going to be a shitshow, pardon my French. You don’t screw up that badly and let the worst global monetary crisis in four generations happen on your watch with it having been any other way. So, when the FOMC transcripts for 2008 finally came out early in 2014, I knew [...]
For central bankers like Bill Dudley and Ben Bernanke, the Global Financial Crisis was a godsend. So much had been a disaster it was hard to pin down specific failures. Where does one begin? Practically everything went wrong, so take your pick. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) did its part pointing the finger at those greedy Wall Street bankers [...]
It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but to that point it did suggest something had changed. Things were going wrong and afterward the very idea of wrong took on an even more disastrous nature. On Monday, September 29, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted nearly 778 points. It was the largest single day’s point loss in the [...]
Understand what the word “transitory” truly means in this context. It is no different than Ben Bernanke saying, essentially, subprime is contained. To the Fed Chairman in early 2007, this one little corner of the mortgage market in an otherwise booming economy was a transitory blip that booming economy would easily withstand. Just eight days before Bernanke would testify confidently [...]
It’s the most testable of all hypothesis, yet the one which no one wants to test. The central bank is central. All the textbooks say it. You’ve been taught to believe it from your first introduction to Economics and finance. Whatever happens, you aren’t supposed to fight the Fed. The US central bank unleashed powerful, novel liquidity programs, an ultra-loose [...]
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdotes is not data. It might also be said that the plethora of anecdotes does not make for accurate news. Before around mid-December 2018, media outlets particularly those like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal anxious to vindicate the technocrats at the Federal Reserve couldn’t print enough stories about the labor shortage. Barely [...]
Clothed in immense self-denial, hung up on absurd self-confidence, Federal Reserve officials gathered on August 7, 2007, to discuss how things really weren’t as bad as everyone seemed to think. There were several key conversations taking place at the FOMC meeting held then all leading nowhere. Policymakers would literally laugh off obvious distress in crucial markets. Here’s one example: MR. [...]
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