With stocks selling off at least in morning trading, everyone is back asking “is it over” after last week supposedly quelled so much surface disquiet. The rebound in oil prices has been robust and a broad survey of “dollar” proxies indicated that the hugely negative run from August has relented. The notable exception to that trend has been Brazil and [...]
I think it is worth re-examining at this point, with a lull in the “dollar” at the moment, the effects of dark leverage upon actual bank mechanics and thus actual “dollar” supply. The idea of liquidity in the wholesale system is multi-dimensional and often confusing as it relates to what is typically believed. For example, the week the world woke [...]
In her testimony before Congress in July, Janet Yellen laid out the same talking points that have been propagated onto Americans time and time again these past eight years. The economy is moving forward and the Fed is doing and has done everything it can, and that there are “green shoots” still though no full and mature growth. Low oil [...]
The Jackson Hole gathering may end up providing at least some clarification, but not even close to the manner in which everyone seems intent on inferring. With Janet Yellen’s notable absence, there isn’t the same sort of celebrity about what would have been the media hanging upon every word; that is, after all, what the Federal Reserve has become, not [...]
Today’s release of personal income and spending is very much related to the revised GDP figures, though I have no doubt that the BEA wishes it were not. To start with, the ongoing chain of benchmark revisions has produced an inordinately volatile set of economic accounts. That is quite against the stated purpose of all this adjusting and statistical intrusiveness; [...]
The moment you add the yen to any larger financial discussion it inevitably brings out passionate response. I think that is derived partially from its status as unbelievably durable; if there is one currency in the world that “deserves”, so to speak, ultimate execution it is that of the Japanese. The Bank of Japan has done more than any other [...]
It looks like the reversal of Monday’s dramatic and frightful liquidation has held and gained in the past two days. From that we can infer, of only the near-term, that those forced repositions were enough to square the liquidity imbalance from the latest “dollar” run. The two words are related not just in a common semantic root, as liquidations are [...]
Lost in the euphoria over second quarter GDP revisions is the ongoing corporate struggle in terms of profits and how that suggests a more than reasonable proportion of GDP’s ability to measure the economy is overstated. To this point, I had focused more so on the productivity problems as they related to a potential over-optimism of the labor market but [...]
It seems increasingly to dawn on Chinese commentary that there is much more going on than “devaluation.” The latest has drawn in the Chinese hoard of UST assets, as it is clear that China is “selling” them though there is great confusion as to why or even what that actually means. The world of forex “reserves” is a bit more [...]
At some point, these continuous divergences between seasonally-adjusted extrapolations and unadjusted year-over-year comparisons will cease to provide so much apparent relief. Time after time, the smallest jump in the monthly variation is taken as cause for completely discarding all prior economic worries even though the more measured and consistent unadjusted growth rates continue to press downward; especially since time and [...]
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