I have no idea if Sir John Bond, former head of HSBC, is or was superstitious, but if he wasn’t maybe it would have helped the bank if had been. In November 2002, the British bank announced a huge American purchase, buying Household International for $14.2 billion in HSBC stock. This was no small thing at that time, the stock [...]
For the very few in the mainstream of economics who venture further back in history than October 1929, they typically still don’t go much last April 1925. And when they do, it is only to further bash the gold standard for its presumed role in creating the conditions for 1929. The Brits under guidance of Winston Churchill made a grave [...]
Is Mexico about to go down the same road as China, Brazil, and so many others have the past few years? The more interesting question may be what took so long, if they are. Mexico’s central bank has been forced into action again, after interjecting itself last month supplying dollars directly to Mexican banks, as well as the same in [...]
Rather than bury this chart in my earlier discussion of liquidity preferences, I felt it deserved its own piece to highlight what it shows. By all traditional and orthodox Economics, this just should not be possible. Yet, there it is and it’s not the only example of violation. For very different markets as robust as each one is, there should [...]
There was an extremely odd dynamic for monetary policy during the 1990’s and especially in the United States. The less Alan Greenspan said, the more markets were convinced he knew what he was doing. He purposefully said nothing, being attributed years later with developing this “fedspeak.” So long as he continued to say nothing, the more he would have to [...]
If more people desire a certain thing, in a free market the price of that certain thing will go up regardless of any possible inherent value. Indeed, that is how market consensus is supposed to work, the backbone of efficient markets. I don’t believe that markets are or ever can be perfectly efficient, especially in the current age where assumptions [...]
The hedge fund industry is not quite dead yet, meaning that it can still cause a great deal of disruption before it expires. It is here where things like rehypothecation and the bastardization of prime brokerage functions were perfected, such that we might use that term in this manner. Despite so much outward attention paid in this direction, very little [...]
It is largely irrelevant, but still the political theater is fascinating. As is now standard operating procedure, whatever comes out of the Trump administration immediately is conferred as the standard for awful. This is not my own determination, mind you, but that of the mainstream, whatever that is these days. And so it is with the first set of budget [...]
My colleague Joe Calhoun likes to remind me that markets and fundamentals only sound like they should be related, an observation that is a correct one on so many different levels. Stock prices, in general, and GDP growth may seem to warrant some kind of expected correlation, but it has proven quite tenuous at times especially in a 21st century [...]
Right now there are two conventional propositions behind the “reflation” trade, and in many ways both are highly related if not fully intertwined. The first is that interest rates have nowhere to go but up. The Fed is raising rates again and seems more confident in doing more this year than it wanted to last year. With nominal rates already [...]
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