Did Bear Stearns fail, or was it rescued? In March 2008, how you answered that particular question bled into your outlook on the rest of that year (and, apparently, forever after). If you chose to believe that the subprime crisis had been successfully handled by uneasy negotiation, the challenges everyone was confronting in early 2008 might not have seemed so [...]
Ever since the widespread adoption of the rules, so to speak, of Positive Economics the discipline has been trading intuitive sense for mathematics. The equations of econometrics are, for Economists, more “real” than reality. To get to those statistical regressions it requires a whole lot of subjectivity. It doesn’t seem that way at first, or that it could be this [...]
The Chinese economy had been sailing along fairly smoothly in the aftermath of the Great Somehow Global “Recession.” While the economies of Europe and the United States seemed suspiciously subdued especially given the scale of the contraction which registered in each, EM economies appeared unbothered. Then came 2011. There were already escalating warnings coming out of 2010, but in the [...]
At the end of last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported data on US Personal Income and Spending that hit every sour note. There was the lowest inflation rate, the deflator to those spending figures, in years as well as the clear need to officially anoint a successor to the Verizon madness. The release also featured residual seasonality, and, [...]
In a way, the government shutdown couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. As workers all throughout the sprawling bureaucracy were furloughed, markets had run into chaos. Even the seemingly invincible stock market was pummeled, a technical bear market emerged on Wall Street as people began to really consider increasingly loud economic risks. There had been noises overseas, troubling [...]
The BEA has completed its unscheduled departure from its release schedule. Due to the prior federal government shutdown, the government agency was only able to put together two estimates for Q4 2018 real GDP. The first had seemed to calm some fears that US growth was wobbly toward the end of last year, aligning uncomfortably with what we are more [...]
On February 7, the 3-month LIBOR rate (US$) fell sharply. Traders were, as various media outlets reported, stunned. All sorts of excuses were issued, the goal of them cumulatively to deny your lying eyes. Falling LIBOR couldn’t have been the market, especially eurodollar futures, anticipating a rate cut because these same people had been saying (and betting) for nearly two [...]
The September 2007 50 bps rate cut was not actually the Fed’s first panic move; and I mean panic both in the sense that the global system was about to do that, as well as how policymakers were feeling in always being behind the times. Almost a month before, a little over a week after the system broke on August [...]
I’ve never actually seen a chicken running around with its head cut off, though I suppose there’s a video of it somewhere on YouTube I could access. Neither you or I, however, need to partake of the actual gruesome spectacle. We need only monitor the behavior of European monetary officials in order to gain a perfect sense of what it [...]
On June 15, 2007, not even two months before worldwide panic would break out, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was in Atlanta, Georgia, speaking at a monetary policy conference. Sponsored by the Atlanta branch of his organization, as fate would have it Bernanke’s chosen topic was the credit channel for monetary policy. This is something the scholar Bernanke supposedly knew [...]
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