When the Fed is revered as it is in certain circles, its superstitions afford unwavering faith and even straight up desire. It is much, much easier and comforting to believe in a benevolent guiding spirit, an all-powerful force of good that removes all the nightmares. The cultivation of that ideal started in the 1980’s but reached its apex in the [...]
Ben Bernanke has shown a singular capacity from his entire time as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, one that he has clearly held onto and even nurtured in the nearly two years since he left office. Unlike many other notable economists, Bernanke still has the ability to astound, to produce an uneven marvel at how the man ever got so [...]
China’s economic update for December and Q4 were uniformly ugly. GDP fell to 6.8% and 6.9% for the full year. Industrial production was back below 6%, estimated at just 5.9% and once more denying all those that claimed November’s slight uptick was the start of renewal. Retail sales disappointed at 11.1%, down from 11.2% in November (no difference) while Fixed [...]
Part 1 is HERE. In March 1969, while Buba was busy in the quicksand of its swaps and forward dollar interventions, Netherlands Bank (the Dutch central bank) had instructed commercial banks in Holland to pull back funds from the eurodollar market in order to bring up their liquidity positions which had dwindled dangerously during this increasing currency chaos. At the [...]
The finance ministers and representatives of central banks from the world’s ten largest “capitalist” economies gathered in Bonn, West Germany on November 20, 1968. The global financial system was then enthralled by a third major currency crisis of the past year or so and there was great angst and disagreement as to what to do about it. While sterling had [...]
This past week, the S&P 500 Cap-Weighted Index ((IVV)) tested and then broke strong support at the 50 and 200-day moving averages after a remarkable rebound from its crushing meltdown earlier this year. Look for a possible bounce here, as we tested resistance from the previous low set in August and the market is slightly oversold. The S&P 500 is down 7.87% [...]
Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream; that’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor…and surviving. - From Apocalypse Now It doesn’t take much to awaken the bears on Wall Street. A couple of weeks of fairly routine stock market activity to the downside and every website [...]
It’s one of those myths that persist no matter how many times it fails to live up to itself. Perhaps that is due to the fact that it originates in simplifying assumptions that allow econometric models nothing more than avoiding disqualifying singularities (infinity) in the equations. I am thinking about the assumption that is widely used in orthodox theory that [...]
If top level sales are not to ever become what economists projected, as retail sales left little doubt in December, then what is left is to no longer hold the line as best as possible on resources and inputs. With inventory already massive, production must be brought down to equalize sales at each level plus already accumulated(ing) inventory. With the [...]
The scale of the inventory bloat in the latter half of 2015 was perplexing. By any reasonable standard, it doesn’t make any sense that businesses would be so bold as to almost ignore sales (and this applies at each level of the supply chain). The only way that it could have possibly occurred was businesses setting aside what was happening [...]
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