The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) revised Q2 GDP to a 4.07464% continuously compounded annual rate from 4.13987%. More importantly, the BEA provided revised benchmark estimates for corporate profits. The good news is that the benchmark was higher. The bad news is that companies still aren’t making any money. All the revisions applied to long ago years (2008 and 2009 [...]
There had been whispers that the FOMC would have to undertake a second “technical adjustment” this year. Is it coincidence that the eurodollar futures curve inverted on the same day, June 13, Jay Powell announced the first one? Perhaps, but given what we are talking about here there is a fair chance they are related, especially in the close aftermath [...]
On December 8, 1940, Winston Churchill wrote to Franklin Roosevelt. The situation was indeed grim, France having fallen to the Germans and the United Kingdom pushed right off Continental Europe. Defeats in the Pacific were some of the worst in the long history of the British Nation. The battle was now raging over English skies, the island isolated in every [...]
The global economy was in very rough shape in 1980. Caught in the spiral of the Great Inflation, there was practically nowhere to hide from ripping upheaval – beyond just the economic problems. Despite trying seemingly everything for an entire decade, nothing Economists came up with would rebalance the system. They kept saying they only needed time for their schemes [...]
Earlier this year, two law professors at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law took issue with of all things Tobin’s Q. Though named for James Tobin, the idea had been introduced much earlier by several people. Tobin popularized one view of the concept. Robert Bartlett and Frank Partnoy objected to many of the contemporary uses. To judge firm [...]
It’s that time of year. September, the leaves start to turn and the air grows crisp. Autumn smells arrive; the Chinese prepare for their nationalist Golden Week. Ever since 2014 and the dollar’s rise, that is, eurodollar tightening especially in Asia, these holiday bottlenecks are never boring. To be shut down for an entire week in early October, the banking [...]
It was never trade wars. Geopolitics draws the online clicks, real answers were always something else. In a world where populism is the rising political strain, you would think there would be honesty in trying to assess its roots. It would require, however, honest thinking. That’s been in short supply for a very long time. Last week, CNBC reported the [...]
At one time, economics actually cared about eurodollars. Maybe it was because the thing was so new, it was a hot, sexy topic, the kind of strange and unusual deviation from the norm that can grasp someone’s attention and hold it. Perhaps it was the way in which it all began, an entire monetary system clandestinely sorted together out of [...]
Eleven years apparently isn't near enough. For the occasion of yet another year passing since August 9, 2007, and nothing much having been done about it, in partnership with MacroVoices I published a second series of Eurodollar University. Whereas Season One focused on the history and buildup of shadow money, where it came from and why, Season Two moved on [...]
In June 2003, while discussing the vote that would take the federal funds rate to its then-lowest point, 1%, Alan Greenspan committed what may have been the greatest monetary sin of modern times. The focus for much of the discussion was Japan, that country’s central bank pioneering at that early date all the things the Fed and other majors would [...]
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