What everyone is saying, because it’s convenient, is that China’s zero-COVID policies are going to harm the economy. No. Economic harm of the past is the reason for the zero-COVID policies. As I showed yesterday, the cracking down didn’t just show up around 2020, begun right out in the open years beforehand, born from the scattering ashes of globally synchronized [...]
This week will almost certainly end up as a clash of competing interest rate policy views. Everyone knows about the Federal Reserve’s upcoming, the beginning of what is intended to be a determined inflation-fighting campaign for a US economy that American policymakers worry has been overheated. The FOMC will vote to raise the federal funds range (and IOER plus RRP) [...]
There’s another foreign angle to the grave misconceptions about what overseas financial entities are doing, and are made to do, with specifically US Treasury assets (and overall US$ assets more broadly). The American public, anyway, has wrongly been led to believe that those outside the US must hate the US and its dollar; at least its recklessly spendthrift government. None [...]
The 30-year US Treasury bond yield dipped below 2% today for the first time since early February. The unsurprising nasty “surprise” in the ISM combined with more concerning data especially surrounding China released over the long American holiday weekend have added more weight to fears the global economy has reached the limits of reopening. If we’ve already seen its best [...]
Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell rarely gives media interviews. Most of his interaction with journalists takes place in the carefully controlled – and credentialed – environment of post-meeting press conferences. One notable exception was last May when the Fed’s head guy visiting with 60 Minutes so that he could, pardon the expression, lie his ass off. Today, March 25, 2021, [...]
The company isn’t bankrupt, it just doesn’t have the right currency in its reach to repay debts coming due. YPF is Argentina’s (former) gold mine, in this case the black gold of energy exploitation. State-owned, the business has obviously close ties to the ruling powers-that-be and a privileged place to go along with them. Its formal name, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, [...]
Unlike some sentiment indicators, the ISM Non-manufacturing, in particular, actual trade in goods continued to contract in May 2020. Both exports and imports fell further, though the rate of descent has improved. In fact, that’s all the other, more subdued PMI’s like Markit’s have been suggesting. Getting closer to a bottom.Unlike any of the sentiment numbers, however, these trade figures [...]
On March 15, 2013, the US Treasury Department issued a request for a “large position report” (17 CFR Part 420). Any institution holding $2 billion or more of the 2% notes expiring in February 2023 (10-year maturity) had until March 21 to disclose that fact to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (faxed disclosures accepted). The repo rate for [...]
Count me among the bond vigilantes. On the issue of supply I yield (pun intended) to no one. The US government is the brokest entity humanity has ever conceived – and that was before March 2020. There will be a time, if nothing is done, where this will matter a great deal.That time isn’t today nor is it tomorrow or [...]
If there’s been one small measure of progress, and a needed one, it has been the mainstream finally pushing commentary into the right category. Back in ’08, during the worst of GFC1 you’d hear it all described as “flight to safety.” That, however, didn’t correctly connote the real nature of what was behind the global economy’s dramatic wreckage. Flight to [...]
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