I don’t think that was quite the message the FOMC wanted to send. It’s pretty clear what the Committee wanted to say, or wanted everyone to hear. The members are done with rate cuts because everything looks great. Sure, it all looked great to them last year but, as has become the conventional interpretation of late, hey, at least it [...]
Even though it was a stunning turn of events, the move was widely celebrated. The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee, the FOMC, hadn’t been scheduled to meet until the end of that month. And yet, Alan Greenspan didn’t want to wait. The “maestro”, still at the height of his reputation, was being pressured to live up to it. The Fed [...]
The Germans managed to do it, to avoid meeting the dreaded technical definition of recession. While not a meaningful one, conventional wisdom assigns the classification to any economy which features two straight quarters of declining output typically measured by real GDP. Germany’s was slightly negative in Q2 with most expectations for a repeat in Q3. Instead, deStatis reported last week [...]
The Treasury Department’s TIC for September 2019 finally arrived yesterday. Two months in arrears, it’s often torturous having to wait for the detailed cross border bank figures to show up for particularly noteworthy months. You might remember September for something going on in repo, and TIC is right where we’ve been tracking (trying to) global repo and collateral flows since [...]
Another dovish example to be put on the growing pile of good things? The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) earlier today trimmed one of its many policy rates. The 7-day reverse repo rate will be reduced from 2.55% to 2.50%, a 5 bps cut practically pointless in functional terms widely interpreted instead for its purported “meaning.” Like the Fed, the [...]
Earlier this month, the Statistics Bureau of Japan had reported an enormous surge in household outlays. For the month of September 2019, the Japanese had splurged on everything from big ticket items to regular discretionary products. Total spending in the month was up 9.5% year-over-year in real terms, an enormous increase which had been the fastest pace ever recorded in [...]
US Industrial Productions continues to more and more resemble the worst of the Euro$ #3, that “manufacturing recession” of four years ago. Back at the end of 2014 and lasting well into 2016, IP was led lower by the oil crash among other problems. They called it a supply glut but we all know that wasn’t ever the case. What [...]
One monthly result does not make a trend. Two? Still not a trend, but edging closer to one and more solid analysis. If making a claim based off the potential for one high frequency result is going out on a limb, then a second result confirming the first while not yet solid ground is at least a bit thicker of [...]
It’s not the level of bank reserves. It never was. QT was always a distraction. As I’ve said from the very beginning, the same thing the Fed’s researchers (rather than top policymakers) will say you if you ask them, the level of bank reserves only tells us what the Fed is doing. It does not, and will not, describe anything [...]
China was the world economy’s best hope in 2017. Like it was the only realistic chance to push out of the post-2008 doldrums, a malaise that has grown increasingly spasmatic and dangerous the longer it goes on. Communist authorities, some of them, anyway, reacted to Euro$ #3’s fallout early on in 2016 by dusting off their Keynes. A stimulus panic [...]
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