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Seriously, Good Luck Dethroning the (euro)Dollar

By |2019-11-21T17:56:50-05:00November 21st, 2019|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Scarcely a week will go by without some grand prediction of the dollar being dethroned. Set aside how if anything is to be deposed it would have to be the eurodollar, these stories typically follow the same formulaic approach: Country X is moving away from dollar reserves, “diversifying” its holdings because of the geopolitics of Y. Usually, it is the [...]

The (Official) World Moves A Little Closer To The Eurodollar

By |2018-04-23T19:01:59-04:00April 23rd, 2018|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The primary reason I focus so much on time is that I believe it is running out. No one possesses a crystal ball, least of all me, and while making such a statement might presume to be intensely negative (doom and gloom) it’s not always that way and it certainly doesn’t have to be. For all the innumerable frustrations, there [...]

TIC Points To ‘Dollar’ Redistribution As Much As Possible Supply

By |2017-12-18T12:59:25-05:00December 18th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

We ended last week with a clear sign that global “dollars” are in (escalating) shortage. I would write “again” with that sentence but there is every indication that said shortage never really ended. It’s not like last year’s “reflation” was a switch from insufficient supply to sufficient, rather it was a relative change to a degree that isn’t easily established [...]

Chart of the Week: …ummmm

By |2017-12-15T12:53:42-05:00December 15th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Back in early October, I noted that repo fails had jumped above $250 billion (combined “to receive” and “to deliver”) for three weeks straight. That wasn’t an auspicious result, as sustained collateral problems like that don’t correlate to happy things. It all began the week of September 5, in what seemed like a minor one-day nuisance over the 4-week bill [...]

Seriously, Wherefore Art Thou Collateral?

By |2017-12-07T17:35:32-05:00December 7th, 2017|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

I’m going to go out on a limb and claim there is something seriously wrong in repo. All jokes aside, I know it sounds like a broken record but the dimension that matters is not intermittent collateral problems so much as the greater intensity to them and in a condensing timeframe. Escalation is a description you really don’t want to [...]

TIC For August (China’s Belgian Hong Kong Dollars)

By |2017-10-23T18:08:58-04:00October 23rd, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The Chinese have been on a UST buying spree of late, having announced to the world several months into it that they were intent on keeping it going. The idea in publicly endorsing and really highlighting their official activity was as a currency policy – to stabilize CNY against its highly disruptive tendency toward devaluation (which isn’t really devaluation). How [...]

TIC For August (Background)

By |2017-10-23T18:09:31-04:00October 23rd, 2017|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The Treasury International Capital (TIC) report produced somewhat of an anomaly in its update for August 2017. There was a lot going on during that month, mostly as UST yields fell (even though interest rates have nowhere to go but up, supposedly) while CNY continued its blistering ascent. As to the latter, it was quite clear by then Chinese actions [...]

Dollar Denial

By |2017-10-18T12:50:45-04:00October 18th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

At this point in the longer term process of unwinding the Fed’s prior emergency activities, the yield curve was supposed to flatten. That was the plan all along. If monetary policy was successful, or had even run into just dumb luck somewhere in the last ten years, here where policymakers declare the economy to be short rates would be moving [...]

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