At the very least, you have to recognize the correlation. If you aren’t willing to consider causation, in part, there’s troubling coincidence in every place around the world between huge government deficits and less growth (therefore the constant inflation "puzzle"). You can argue that the former causes the latter, and that’s absolutely a valid case; when things get rough, neo-Keynesians [...]
Economists’ R*, or R-star, is a fiction. It’s one that they came up with after-the-fact to try to explain why their policies didn’t actually work the way policymakers had initially promised. While in public, officials still speak glowingly of each QE, one after another after another, in private they know it deserves absolutely no praise. Study after study has shown [...]
60.3 Powell likens Fed’s COVID response to Dunkirk———Part 3 Summary———Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell analogized the central bank actions in March 2020 to the heroic evacuation of soldiers from Dunkirk in WW2. A more fitting analogy is the blunderous loss at Dunkirk that necessitated the rescue at all. ———Episode 60 Intro——— Jeff Snider is in his element in Episode 60, [...]
60.2 Oil Market Issues Economic Warning———Part 2 Summary———The headline oil price has been falling since early-March, but insiders were alerted 10 days earlier of possible trouble by the futures curve. What is contango? What is backwardation? Do oil futures tell us the economy is struggling to gain additional liftoff? ———Episode 60 Intro——— Jeff Snider is in his element in Episode [...]
Eurodollar futures are derivative, cash-settled contracts linked to 3-month LIBOR (forget about SOFR and the official hatred of this offshore dollar rate regime). Though that rate acts independently especially at the worst times (thus, the hate), it is heavily influenced by the front-end monetary alternatives set by the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy (IOER, RRP). Because of this, LIBOR kind of [...]
My entire premise was to make this mockingly simple. Econometrics demands mathematical precision yet always comes up empty because its calculations, no matter how elegantly complex, proceed from the falsest of subjective assumptions. It won’t matter how awesome the computing power if the thing you’re trying to compute doesn’t work or act the way you believe (because everyone says so [...]
60.1 Quantitative Easing 20 Year Anniversary!———Part 1 Summary———On March 19, 2001 CNN described quantitative easing by the Bank of Japan as "inject[ing] a large amount of money into the Japanese economy." It wasn't large, it wasn't money, and it never got to the economy. In two decades nothing has changed; not in Japan - not anywhere. ———Episode 60 Intro——— Jeff [...]
It is said that there are two types of people in this world. Those who see the glass as half full and those who see it as half empty. On Wall Street, we call them bulls and bears. A bull can see an economic report and perceive it in a way that seems wholly illogical, misguided, and downright stupid to [...]
One other fascinating, corroborating angle to the short run picture comes at us from Europe, specifically Germany. As illustrated yesterday, there’s a whole bunch of market prices/indications from around the world which have keyed in on February 24-25 as a possible turning point. The most obvious candidate which may have triggered it would be February 25th’s major US Treasury selloff. [...]
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