I have referred to the June 2003 FOMC meeting many times before and I suspect that I will continue to do so long into the future. It was one of those events that should be marked in history, truly relevant to the future developments that became panic and now sustained economic decay. It’s as if the committee members at that [...]
It was an impressive rebound from the doldrums of February 11. Stocks managed to get back nearly even, as the S&P 500 closed above 2,100 on successive days April 19 and 20. Since then it has been more of a struggle; sideways to slightly lower. Gold has remained near and above $1,250 while funding markets and UST’s have been bid [...]
Inflation is a complicated subject that has been devalued as if it were simply some variable in an equation. It starts with the very premise itself, as if an index of a bucket of consumer prices equals a comprehensive review of the subject. As Irving Fisher realized more than a century ago, money can go into places beyond any CPI’s [...]
Wholesale sales rose just 0.8% in March, following a similar rise in February. For the quarter, sales dropped almost 2% from Q1 2015. More importantly, inventory barely budged in either March or for the quarter. Rising just 0.2% in the latest month, that was the smallest yearly gain since June 2010. In Q1 overall, wholesale inventories were also practically unchanged [...]
It is a myth of the modern age, particularly post-1930’s, that the American banking system needed a central bank in order to perform the function of currency “elasticity.” There were, of course, several severe bank panics that occurred in the decades before the Federal Reserve but they did not end with its imposition. The worst banking liquidation wave in history [...]
Japanese officials including those at the Bank of Japan have been acting very erratic of late, eschewing the more traditional financial setting of vagueness. First it was NIRP that immediately blew up in their face, leading to very loud rumors of additional bank “stimulus” to offset NIRP only to have the BoJ instead do nothing at its last policy meeting. [...]
If the Fed is data dependent in its monetary policy setting, then the current update for the labor market should keep them still inactive (or at least not raising the federal funds rate that nobody uses). While the main payroll report last Friday was disappointing, it remains largely irrelevant as does the unemployment rate in determining FOMC tendencies. We are [...]
It is absolutely clear that the eurodollar system last functioned on August 8, 2007. Starting August 9, nothing would ever be the same. In describing and detailing how it got that way (the sudden fragmentation between “dollars” in NYC and London, for example) there is a natural tendency to compartmentalize even realizing the drastic implications of what it all meant. [...]
Throughout 2014 and even into 2015, the word “decoupling” was resurrected to try to calm growing unease about the direction of global growth. It’s first broad usage was during the first part of the Great Recession, as economists were sure that emerging markets then would be able to weather the “slowdown” of 2008 believed at that time confined to the [...]
In August last year, Caterpillar announced that it was moving manufacturing jobs back to America from Mexico. The truck and equipment company had entered what is called the “vocational truck” business back in 2011 but in a partnership with Navistar. Using its facility in Escobedo, Nuevo Leon, Navistar assembled these vocational units for Caterpillar under that Caterpillar’s brand. Last year’s [...]
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