The Federal Reserve, like other central banks around the world, it does lend out the securities it owns and holds. Sophisticated modern wholesale money markets are highly collateralized, so much so that collateral itself takes on the properties of currency. Elasticity of collateral is as much – if not more – important as elasticity of other forms of wholesale money [...]
A full part of the inflation hysteria, the first one, was the dollar’s looming crash. The currency was, too many claimed, on the verge of collapse by late 2017, heading downward and besieged on multiple fronts by economics and politics alike. Basically, the Fed had “printed” too much “money” and the Chinese playing some “long game” were purportedly ready at [...]
When Alan Greenspan sat in front of the politicians in Congress back in February 2005, he purposefully made it seem like what was taking place at that time was some kind of new and unusual development. Yeah, the guy who had previously become famous for fedspeak – the ability to use a lot of words while saying nothing – would [...]
When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money.The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it [...]
The dollar was high and going higher. Emerging markets had been seriously complaining. In one, the top central banker for India outright warned, “dollar funding has evaporated.” The TIC data supported his view, with full-blown negative months, net selling from afar that’s historically akin to what was coming out of India and the rest of the world. China was cutting [...]
With the monthly Friday Payroll Ritual lurking tomorrow morning, and having been focused on PMI estimates before it, a quick look at the ISM’s Non-manufacturing PMI especially its employment index to bridge the latter to the former. The update today for the month of December put the headline estimate at 62.0, down from 69.1 the month prior.Omicron?While a rather sharp [...]
Sentiment indicators like PMI’s are nice and all, but they’re hardly top-tier data. It’s certainly not their fault, these things are made for very times than these (piggy-backing on the ISM Manufacturing’s long history without having the long history). Most of them have come out since 2008, if only because of the heightened professional interest in macroeconomics generated by a [...]
The Beveridge Curve was a useful guide for checking the intuitive relationship between the economic demand for labor and the actual use of it. Downward sloping, what it implies is that as more companies demand more labor the less unemployment there should be. No duh, right?Because of this fundamental relationship, we might also use the Beveridge Curve in order to [...]
There were a few surprises included in the BLS JOLTS data just released today for the month of November (note: the government has changed its release schedule so that JOLTS, already one month further in arrears than the payroll report, CES & CPS, will now come out earlier so that its numbers are publicly available for the same monthly payrolls [...]
Because there is no actual money in monetary policy, central banks have forced themselves (by having abandoned the monetary system decades ago) into an economic role that looks something like a hypnotist’s. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, the man said, but in lieu of any practical experience in money what is a central bank to do?Manipulate emotion. Give it a [...]
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