It wasn’t all that long ago when the media began to fill itself up with one story after another about how huge looming inflationary pressures were causing the entire “market” to rethink its lengthy and determined anti-reflationary stance. Back in March, for instance, S&P had joined this chorus by zeroing in on eurodollar futures, of all instruments, and coming back [...]
For the month of May 2021, China’s General Administration of Customs believes the total US$ value of exports exiting that country was an impressive-sounding $263.9 billion. Compared to the US$ value of exports sent abroad in May 2020, this was a 27.9% increase. But base effects; exports in May 2020 had been a little more than 3% below those in [...]
We got another disappointing employment report last week. Well, that's what everyone said anyway, that the complete WAG by the BLS that the US economy added 559,000 jobs in May was below expectations and disappointing. I suppose it is a tad disappointing but I find it hard to lament the fact that a half-million Americans found jobs last month. There [...]
February’s cold winter blast throughout the Southern United States was supposed to have been the extent of the weakness. The unusual and unusually severe freeze caused a great deal of havoc, making its way very quickly into economic data. The recovery was said to have been on a winning streak (vaccines, gov’t payments, etc.) so it seemed the easiest correlation [...]
Ever since March 2020, GFC2, Federal Reserve officials from Jay Powell on down have been busy patting themselves on the back for their splendid performance during last year’s big event. Again, market-of-last-resort. It would’ve been much worse, they claim, particularly given what happened in the Treasury market itself which we are supposed to believe QE bailed out just in the [...]
When Ben Bernanke stood up in front of Milton Friedman (it was his 90th birthday) back in November 2002, what he told the co-author of A Monetary History was that the monetary account contained within its pages had become settled, the officially-accepted version of events. What had made the Great Depression truly prolonged and horrific had been the long-ago Federal [...]
Taking our limited repo example from Part 1 a step further still, in real-world operation a bank might put up any number of securities – including any it might have just that day obtained full title too – to secure financing all at once. Thus, there are groupings of securities over which the bank has varying degrees of control – [...]
Denmark’s Niels Bohr considered himself more of a philosopher than a physicist, yet he contributed so much to the groundbreaking approach that became the basis for quantum physics. At the same time Germany’s Werner Heisenberg was writing the famous paper on “his” uncertainty principle, Bohr was purportedly on vacation thinking up the deeper consequences and meaning of all its implications.Upon [...]
The US economy is still stuck in the stall it's been in since early spring. Sometime in mid-March everything just seems to have gone into suspended animation. Interest rates and the copper/gold ratio stopped rising. Real interest rates (TIPS) stopped rising. The US dollar started falling. But nothing has fallen so far as to warrant concern about a double-dip recession. [...]
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