When grounded in the framework of traditional banking, wholesale dynamics can be quite confusing to the point of being impenetrable. Nowhere is that more the case than the wholesale ideas of currency and what counts for establishing chains of traded liabilities. In the traditional banking/monetary framework, everything is reducible to money; all else are just derivative claims on it. The [...]
As doubts surrounding QE have grown, there has been a somewhat detectable if still small trend in central banker repentance. Alan Greenspan to an extent has embraced a more decentralized and market framework in his public comments even though he has yet, to my knowledge, actually repudiate his own work more directly. As noted a few days ago, former BoE [...]
After nearly coming in flat for June, wholesale sales fell almost 5% year-over-year in July. That is the second worst month of this “cycle”, bested only by May’s nearly 7% drop. The six-month average is now -3.2% which is uncomfortably close to the worst part of the dot-com recession which only averaged -4.0% at the low. Despite that sales environment, [...]
It seems as if the PBOC is doing a whole lot and getting very little from it. That is actually expected at least to anyone not caught up in the cult of QE and the like, as that is the very nature of central banks dating back to the original at the Bank of England. Even though the focus has [...]
In February 2010, Bank of England chief Mervyn King was very worried about the fragile nature of the British recovery as it fit within the more nebulous global hoard. There were emerging threats from an “unexpected” setback over a tiny little country on the Aegean, perhaps depressing Europe so soon out of the depths of the global Great Recession. Mervyn [...]
When the Bank of Japan announced on October 31, 2014, that it would increase the scale of QQE to ¥80 trillion annually, it noted the usual surfeit words that have clearly been passed around to everyone within network connectivity of the central axis of orthodox economics. You can honestly close your eyes and have someone read aloud the text and [...]
If on the fence trying to decide whether surging job openings or tailing hiring is the true representation of the economy (recognizing that these are not mutually exclusive propositions, just that it isn’t very likely they both coexist in anything but subjectively statistical fancy) Gallup just offered far more of the latter. Should actual job openings hold some kind of [...]
Typically when any statistic gets way out ahead of itself it will eventually revert toward its prior state. That is the nature of stochastic modeling in economic accounts and it presents a great weakness. It is not unshared, however, as that is nothing more than recency bias applied to a quite dynamic world. The great flaw in any stochastic model [...]
The update to the S&P/LSTA Leveraged Loan Index was pretty much as expected following the interpretations I suggested Friday. Despite the alleviation of direct “dollar” pressure on liquidity subtracting from asset prices, there is a very distinct lack of enthusiasm to, at this point, rebid for margined assets or to pick up “bargains.” The index itself rebounded from a low [...]
In a world saturated by derivatives, the concept of a bellwether of a bellwether might actually make sense. If China is one for the global economy then perhaps South Korea might be it for China. Unlike Japan, South Korea hasn’t had the yawning chasm of QQE to alter its balances, therefore the level of shipments particularly to China offer perhaps [...]
Stay In Touch