The BIS in its quarterly review published yesterday included a reference to the eurodollar market (thanks to M. Daya for pointing it out). The central bank to central banks, as the outfit is often called, is one of the few official institutions that have taken a more objective position with regard to the global money system. Of the very few [...]
The ISM Manufacturing PMI registered 57.7 in February 2017, the highest value since August 2014 (revised). It was just slightly less than that peak in the 2014 “reflation” cycle. Given these comparisons, economic narratives have been spun further than even the past few years where “strong” was anything but. The ISM’s gauge of orders increased to the highest level in [...]
November 2008 was an extremely busy month for authorities in the US. The financial markets had just undergone panic the month before, but rather than dissipate there were lingering indications that all was not yet over. On November 23, 2008, the Treasury Department, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve issued a joint statement on Citigroup. The first two had agreed [...]
Snapchat, a company that describes itself as a camera company yet makes no cameras, went public last week at a valuation of $24 billion. The company is growing fast, revenue up from $58 million to $405 million in just the last year. And as one publication put it, the company "earned" a loss of $514.6 million in the process. The [...]
Germany is notoriously fickle when it comes to money, speaking as much of discipline in economy or industry as central banking. If ever there is disagreement about monetary arrangements, surely the Germans are behind it. Since ECB policy only ever attains the one direction, so-called accommodation, there never seems to be harmony. But that may only be true because “accommodation” [...]
There is gold in Asia, at least gold of the intellectual variety for anyone who wishes to see it. The Chinese offer us perhaps the purest view of monetary conditions globally, where RMB money markets are by design tied directly to “dollar” behavior. It is, in my view, enormously helpful to obsess over China’s monetary system so as to be [...]
On February 23, the equivalent yield for the 4-week US Treasury bill was just 39 bps. That was almost 11 bps (counting full pips) below the so-called money rate floor, to which T-bills are a near enough equivalent to count in that view. It was also 36 bps below IOER, which at one time was thought to be a huge [...]
I honestly don’t know how much clearer it could possibly get. The mainstream continues to struggle to identify the causes of the “rising dollar” when in all cases it is decidedly simple. The more the dollar goes up, the more whatever counterparty country is paying for those dollars. The entire world is in a synthetic short position created decades ago, [...]
For a “reflation” regime predicated as much on government spending, it was an inauspicious start. Construction spending fell sharply in January, as lackluster growth in the private sector could not offset sharp declines in government activity. At the state and local level, construction spending fell nearly 5% from December (seasonally-adjusted), while at the federal level spending dropped more than 7%. [...]
As oil prices remain as they are in relation to where they were one year ago, measured inflation rates have come back up, some faster than others. This does mimic the real world situation where consumers are paying more now for gasoline than they did last year. Even though they are paying less than three years ago for the same [...]
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