Once you see the whole thing, you can’t unsee it. But therein lies the problem. It is so far out there away from mainstream convention getting anyone to recognize what their eyes are recording is an enormous task. Even when someone happens to uncover, for themselves, a significant piece it is often too unfamiliar to truly appreciate its significance. In [...]
The eurodollar era saw not one but two credit bubbles. The first has been studied to death, though almost always getting it wrong. The Great Financial Crisis has been laid at the doorstep of subprime, a bunch of greedy Wall Street bankers insufficiently regulated to have not known any better. That was just a symptom of the first. The housing [...]
Critics of government debt, a group which really should include every taxpayer, like to point out how governments prefer to pay back that debt with hugely inflated currency. You don’t pay it off so much as inflate it away. Change the convertibility number for your local currency and, voila, a much more manageable credit profile emerges. Only, there are often [...]
Even on a six-month cumulative basis, it is rare to find a negative number. These are reserved for the big ones, the market-shaking events that either perform an inflection or confirm one as it reaches pretty hard depths. The world being the way that it is, you just don’t see the whole forced into outright selling (on net) US$ assets. [...]
More important than the US GDP number, more substantial than the February jobs report, what will linger for longer in the public consciousness is China’s trade data. It seems as if the big drop in exports has garnered the most immediate attention, I suspect that won’t be the case moving forward. There are more important trends being captured where the [...]
China’s central bank was given more independence to conduct monetary policies in late 2003. It had been operating under Order No. 46 of the President of the People’s Republic of China issued in March 1995, which led the 3rd Session of the Eighth National People’s Congress (China’s de facto legislature) to create and adopt the Law of the People's Republic [...]
While oil prices rebounded in January 2019 around the world, outside of crude commodities continued to struggle. According to the World Bank’s Pink Sheet, base metal prices fell another 1.8% on average from December. On an annual basis, these commodities as a group are about 16% below where they were in January 2018. The last time they had fallen by [...]
The payroll report wasn’t actually the first. The Treasury Department filed its Treasury International Capital (TIC) update yesterday, about two weeks late due to the federal government shutdown. However, since nobody follows it and the figures relate to a lot that’s beyond the US economy it doesn’t count in the mainstream view. That’s a shame because TIC will tell you [...]
Central bankers will often tell you exactly what you want to know, at least when it comes to their intentions. You can first begin by reading Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s 1963 monetary bible A Monetary History. It’s all in there. From it, central banks all over the world have devised technical schemes intended to hold fast to the old [...]
We’ve got to change our ornithological nomenclature. Hawks become doves because they are chickens underneath. Doves became hawks for reasons they don’t really understand. A fingers-crossed policy isn’t a robust one, so there really was no reason to expect the economy to be that way. In January 2019, especially the past few days, there are so many examples of flighty [...]
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