It’s not the level of bank reserves. It never was. QT was always a distraction. As I’ve said from the very beginning, the same thing the Fed’s researchers (rather than top policymakers) will say you if you ask them, the level of bank reserves only tells us what the Fed is doing. It does not, and will not, describe anything [...]
China was the world economy’s best hope in 2017. Like it was the only realistic chance to push out of the post-2008 doldrums, a malaise that has grown increasingly spasmatic and dangerous the longer it goes on. Communist authorities, some of them, anyway, reacted to Euro$ #3’s fallout early on in 2016 by dusting off their Keynes. A stimulus panic [...]
What typically distinguishes recessions from downturns is the inventory cycle. Even in 2008, that was the basis for the Great “Recession.” It was distinguished most prominently by the financial conditions and global-reaching panic, true, but the effects of the monetary crash registered heaviest in the various parts of that inventory process. An economy for whatever reasons slows down. That leads [...]
The Federal Reserve has indicated that it will now pause – for a second time, supposedly. Remember the first: after raising its benchmark rates apparatus in December while still talking about an inflationary growth acceleration requiring still more hikes, in a matter of weeks that was transformed into a temporary suspension of them. Expecting the easy disappearance of “transitory” factors, [...]
Another local election in Germany, another stunning defeat for the ruling center. How many more of these does anyone need before they realize the electorate is going to keep in migrating toward the poles? And it all stems from the one reason; there is no and has been no economic growth. But because the so-called establishment has insisted the economy [...]
JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon has been running around Washington claiming that mid-September’s repo rumble was the result of the post-crisis regulatory environment. He now says that his bank had the spare cash and was willing to cash in on double digit repo rates but it was government rules which prevented that from happening. It’s unclear (but we can, and [...]
It’s not surprising that the Census Bureau would report another weird sideways trend in wholesale sales. After all, the agency has already produced that kind of pattern in the related data for durable goods. For reasons that aren’t going to be explained, economic activity across the supply chain from producers to consumers has been curtailed. That hasn’t mean outright shrinking [...]
The idea of a midpoint can be misleading in that we might immediately think of one in terms of time. The middle being exactly in the middle, halfway from the beginning while also halfway to the end. A midpoint need not be so pedant. In looser usage, it can instead denote merely the separation in between two otherwise irregularly spaced [...]
How times have changed. In the middle of 2018, we were told the risks to the global economy were all tilted to the upside. If central bankers weren’t careful, they chanced an uncontrollable inflationary breakout, the kind that would make the last few years of the 2010’s look too much like the 1970’s. Always eager to bottle up the inflation [...]
The Federal Reserve wasn’t the only major central bank conducting open market operations (OMO’s) this week. On the other side of the Pacific, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) had been, too. Big ones. And in both places, nobody really seems to know what to make of them even though they are actually connected to the same offshore dollar problem. [...]
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