If there is something different about the “dollar” in July it is that it has been in widespread pressure on funding. From early May to the beginning of July, the “dollar” was more hit and miss with only regional or limited disruption. Crude prices, for example, rising since the March FOMC, stopped but then traded sideways rather than appreciably lower. [...]
Having past the fifteenth of the month, the first month in the new quarter, the repo “cycle” for the quarter end has completed. Repo rates have followed almost exactly the same pattern as three months earlier, pivoting on both the quarter end and the 15th each time. This is not just unusual, it shouldn’t happen. Compared with other quarter-end periods, [...]
IBM continues to be a bellwether assessment on domestic and global capex, though in 2015 almost everyone wishes it wasn’t. To that end, many have started to downgrade Big Blue based on age in the business cycle and, of course, currency. In many ways, the latest quarterly stumble is the mirror image of when all this started. Plotting IBM’s transformation, [...]
The latest update for TIC “flow”, for the month of May, was mostly what was expected given the “dollar pause” at that time. Central banks were still active but not nearly as engaged as they had been through the worst parts of the “dollar” crisis in late 2014 and early 2015. Official accounts (central banks and foreign governments) had turned [...]
The entire suite of global asset bubbles is predicated on nothing more than promises. It is widely acknowledged, even among those doing the most promising, that so far this “cycle” has been substandard in every way imaginable and at every turn. Yet, for all that continued disappointment, the fact that there was marginal positive numbers remains as the basis for [...]
In case it isn't clear, and it really isn't, the lack of bank capacity matters in ways both indirect and direct. Indirectly, banking and the "dollar" are supposed to support the global economy. Instead, the eurodollar system came to dominate and now we live in its absence as economic trends developed from that domination (hello China), serial asset bubbles as [...]
Last week, Goldman Sachs reported a nearly 30% drop in FICC revenue, far and away the largest decline among the major money dealers. That compared to -10% for JP Morgan’s FICC, and -9.3% at BofAML. There are a couple reasons for the disparity but the largest, at least what you can make out from the bank’s balance sheet, traces back [...]
Today is the fifth anniversary of Dodd-Frank, the erstwhile government response to assure that the Panic of 2008 does not repeat. It was an ill-advised task to begin with as the panic itself took care of repetition. It is not, and never has been, past panic that should worry our future. Along with the legislation came the Consumer Financial Protection [...]
Last week, the Economist published an article ostensibly about the politics of wages. Earned income has become a populist football, apparently, with both political parties jockeying to take the most inane and fallible positions about the economy. As with the midterm elections last fall, the fact that this is in any way still a major political issue more than suggests [...]
Sticking with the history of the “dollar” of these past two years, economists and gold de-buggers had to have been at least initially encouraged by what they saw outwardly of interest rates and related financial factors in 2013. Almost as soon as “taper” became a mainstream concept, right at the start of that May, the treasury curve steepened and nominal [...]
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