It was an absolutely mad scramble. Banking difficulties in the Fed’s sixth district, the Atlanta branch, had sparked an irresistible wave of panic which spread throughout the Eastern seaboard. By December 1930, it had reached the streets of New York City – the world’s monetary capital. On December 11, customer withdrawals had left the Bank of the United States with [...]
Trading partners like Mexico didn’t have a labor participation problem by which to hide the economic downturn last year. The whole idea of “decoupling” in the 2018 sense of the word was how the US economy, by virtue of its 50-year low unemployment rate, couldn’t possibly be as weak as it increasingly appeared overseas. The US was good, they kept [...]
Anna Jacobson Schwartz often gets buried under the mountains of study Milton Friedman conducted on his own. Contrary to what some, perhaps many, might think, Friedman didn’t write A Monetary History by himself. Anna Schwartz was his co-author for what would become one of the most important volumes of economic scholarship of the entire 20th century.Pretty much every central bank [...]
iTunes: https://apple.co/3czMcWN Google-cast: https://shorturl.at/fpsEJ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3arP8mY Alhambra-tube: below SUMMARY Hubris. It will get us to the stars but seduce us into believing we belong there. Today, monetary authorities suffer it, believing they can manage the nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation and feedback loops of the unraveling. DESCRIPTION In 1929 a plague struck Florida resulting in an overwhelming government response. [...]
He called it “unfair competition.” That’s one way to describe it, surely not the proper way. But who could blame the guy? After all, these were not normal times though at the time hardly anyone had yet realized it.James J. Davis was the second person to hold the title Secretary of Labor. Appointed by Warren Harding, he began his tenure [...]
If a central bank controls the money supply, then it can, in theory, control inflation. And if it accomplishes this feat through the use of a short-term money rate, then what part of bond yields would lie beyond its power? None.That’s what bond yields are, after all, in theory the carrying forward of inflation expectations into the future built upon [...]
With survey after survey showing Americans are now firmly more concerned about the economy than the pandemic, the narrative reassurance program will be even more in demand than ever. The latest Axios-Ipsos poll suggests nine out of ten US citizens are today worried about economic disaster. To counter the growing angst, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin declared over the weekend that his [...]
CHANNELS: iTunes: https://apple.co/3czMcWN Google Podcasts: https://shorturl.at/fpsEJ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3arP8mY Emil-Tube: https://youtu.be/yqmVom5lq58 Alhambra-Tube: below SUMMARY: Ancient myths, like the Minotaur of Crete, Monkey King or Odin, are not taken seriously. But modern myths, like the Greenspan Put, the Bank of Japan buying stocks or bond kings selling Treasuries, not only are taken seriously, but acted upon. KEYWORDS: Eurodollar University, Jeff Snider, [...]
As I’ve said, it is a threefold failure of statistical models. The first being those which showed the economy was in good to great shape at the start of this thing. Widely used and even more widely cited, thanks to Jay Powell and his 2019 rate cuts plus “repo” operations the calculations suggested the system was robust.Because of this set [...]
It was chaos. Rumors of not one but two large European banks being pushed to the brink. Money market funds worried about breaking the buck rapidly pulling cash out from under any global name. The FOMC debating what would’ve been a repo-like bailout, even though $1.6 trillion of bank reserves had been “added” to the system. What was most damaging [...]
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