As the monetary world prepares for the monetary equivalent of D-Day, it bears reminiscing about the true lack of confidence that permeates away from the direct public front of the central bank. Yellen has declared that monetary policy will be “data dependent” but that isn’t truly the case. Any such data will be filtered into the Fed’s models, which are [...]
By all meaningful measures, credit markets today aren’t any different than they were after the first “dollar” wave crested and subsided. Despite all that has transpired all over the place in 2015, this resiliency is worrisome. No matter how much commentary wishes it to be a comforting tool of monetary policy adjusting into economic salvation, the fact that these indications [...]
Dealer banks are accomplishing their withdrawal from FICC and the eurodollar necessities of dark leverage in the typical corporate fashion. For one, there is attrition as past derivatives trades simply runoff or mature. Second, banks have been engaging in what are called compression trades to an enormous degree, the money dealing equivalent of synergy. Finally, dealers have been studious and [...]
Economics is a not a science. It tends to emulate the appearances by which outwardly hard sciences project in terms of rules and especially mathematical complications, but it does not conform. Karl Popper observed in 1972 that, “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory [...]
I was rather content to let the matter lie after devoting a couple of lengthy expositions to it, but the Fed has its own way of confirming every charge. I am writing again about the fact that the assumed monetary agency was quite curious about the dramatic changes in banking and money at one point in the not-so-distant past only [...]
Part 1 can be found here Long before Bear Stearns, there was Countrywide and a glimpse into the yawning abyss. But there was also Northern Rock, a UK bank, and a series of tremors and earthquakes rumbling across Germany. It was an entirely surreal period, as the once-mighty German system ground to a spectacular halt on, of all things, US [...]
Written Tuesday Oct 27 It bears repeating and re-emphasizing, but had the guts of the actual global financial system been fully appreciated in a timely manner the current state of the global “dollar” would be cause for celebration. It would matter not that the eurodollar is in full and often violent retreat because that is the exact method by which [...]
Michal Kalecki was a Polish economist whose work in the 1930’s earned him (for what it may be worth) the distinction of being Keynes before Keynes. In other words, because Kalecki was publishing papers and giving lectures in Polish rather than English, his arrival at the same conclusions and outlooks before Keynes in the UK was largely unnoticed. He was [...]
If the consequences for the economy were less important one couldn't help but be amused by the predicament in which Janet Yellen finds herself today. She and her fellow Fed travelers have been "preparing" the market for a rate hike for nearly a year and now it is that very preparation that has kept them from hiking rates as planned. [...]
China’s economy is sliding and nobody can really tell where that downturn will end (though it doesn’t stop the media from proclaiming a bottom at each individual upward variation). Brazil’s economy is in the worst shape in decades, with both volume problems coinciding with the real’s sharp devaluation hammering consumer prices. The country’s central bank has managed to make it [...]
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