Where things stand right now is actually a pretty simple matter. How and why everything might change, as well as how and why we got here, those are more complex issues which depending upon your understanding may not lead to a clear picture of conditions. Right now, we are told, there will be just the [...]
We’ve got repo, erratic federal funds market, German 2s correlated with it, plunging bond yields, angry swaps (IR and FX), and economic data increasingly and more speedily in the wrong direction. Overseas official entities piled even more into the foreign repo pool, their payments dollar buffer, another definitive sign of a much more acute dollar [...]
It seems a paradox, at least like it is backwards. The financial media doesn’t help because good editorial standards rely upon the opinions and beliefs of credentialed people who have no idea what they are talking about. If you hold high office in some central bank, we are to assume you are competent about monetary [...]
It was supposed to be the Chinese government who was going to rescue the global economy. Once the rationalizations ended and officials around the world realized there was serious economic weakness building at the end of 2018 instead of a globally synchronized inflationary recovery, the green shoots of 2019 were going to be in one [...]
If you have nothing left, it can sound like a winning argument but you have to really try hard enough. In October 2015, with another false dawn dawning on the public, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote and op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. As had become his habit, it was full of [...]
It wasn’t the basis for rational analysis, it was a very public admission of bias and error. We don’t know why inflation ultimately will do what we believe it will, they said, we just believe that it will so you should, too. It sounds ludicrous, but it is actually very much in keeping with standard [...]
Early last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the unemployment rate in the United States had fallen to just 3.6%. It was the lowest in half a century, seemingly an amazing feat for the most puzzling boom ever conceived. Everyone says it is going gangbusters, but is everyone saying so simply because [...]
Two on the same day, likely not coincidence. The next stage of “dovishness” may be upon us. It won’t be rate cuts; those won’t happen until all other excuses have been exhausted first. Jay Powell’s confused gang won’t give in until kicking and screaming there’s really nothing else left. The Fed “pause” isn’t working. To [...]
What just happened in Europe? The short answer is T-LTRO. The ECB is getting back to being “accommodative” again. This isn’t what was supposed to be happening at this point in time. Quite the contrary, Europe’s central bank had been expecting to end all its programs and begin normalizing interest rates. The reaction to this [...]
It infects every boardroom across the world. Big business requires decent forecasting, yet time and again it seems they are deprived of what they desperately need. Instead, even after this last decade, the world’s largest companies continue to be surprised by weakness that is far more prevalent than strength. It has been the one constant. [...]
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