In 1928, the fertility rate of American females (aged 15 to 44) was 93.8 per 100,000. By 1931, the first year of full Great Depression and collapse, the rate had declined to 84.6. It would bottom out, unsurprisingly, around 1933 and 1935 and the end of the contraction part of the depression. But what made that economic event “great” wasn’t [...]
In July 2012, the LIBOR manipulation scandal broke wide and before Congress then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used it to cleverly cover up for his crisis actions (more so inactions). He told the Senate Banking Committee that the LIBOR system was “structurally flawed” before intimating it had been that way for some time. Asked if the rates calculated by the [...]
1 - 2017 Summer Series: Milton's Mailbag Released 04 August 2017 Grant and Aaron kick off the 2017 Summer Series by addressing some of the most pressing listener questions during the first season of Adventures in Finance. The guys are also joined by Jeffrey Snider, of Alhambra Partners, and Michael Oliver, of Momentum Structural Analysis, who shed light on the [...]
Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress in March 2007 that subprime was contained. He will rightfully be remembered in infamy for that, but that wasn’t the most egregious example of being wrong. Even putting it in those terms risks understating the problem and why it stubbornly lingers. Being really wrong is claiming that IOER will establish [...]
How do we measure what has been lost over the last ten years? There is no single way to calculate it, let alone a correct solution. There are so many sides to an economy that choosing one risks overstating that facet at the expense of another. It’s somewhat of an impossible task already given the staggering dimensions. If someone had [...]
When Bear Stearns nearly failed, made to merge, in March 2008 it wasn’t really a surprise. Yes, markets were shocked by the demise of the ancient firm, one of the bulge bracket cartel which suggested surprise over the severity of it more than that things were going bad. For more than a year, starting in early 2007, Bear had been [...]
At the end of his life and career, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great American novelist, wrote a series of short stories for Esquire Magazine. It’s difficult to tell whether he was forced into the job, far as it might have seemed from the 1920’s salons of Paris carousing with his wife Zelda and other international intellectual luminaries of the time. [...]
I’m not a conspiracist, and because of that I am often placed in the tough position of having to defend the otherwise indefensible. The Federal Reserve is not a cabal of evil geniuses dedicated to bringing down the global order so as to create a new one with its Wall Street masters in complete control. They are instead a clown-show, [...]
The JOLTS report for June 2017 showed another surge in Job Openings. Hitting a record high, the BLS estimates there were nearly 6.2 million, up sharply from 5.7 million in May. As many in the media like to point out, Janet Yellen has declared Job Openings a favored economic statistics purportedly as a gauge of labor demand. Why they think [...]
China’s export growth disappointed in July, only we don’t really know by how much. According to that country’s Customs Bureau, exports last month were 7.2% above (in US$ terms) exports in July 2016. That’s down from 11.3% growth in June, which as usual had been taken in the mainstream as evidence of “strong” or “robust” global demand. According to China’s [...]
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