The simple narrative about QE is drawn from what is believed a simple process. The central bank buys bonds and by doing so it is simply assumed to be an “extra” bid on bond prices; therefore interest rates fall in whatever issue is being targeted by QE. Even in the US, QE has had trouble with that simple relationship. Instead [...]
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 [...]
Last week, the CBO updated some of its calculations and methods for estimating the effects of “automatic stabilizers” on the deficit. These are Keynesian concepts whereby the government increases spending or redistribution (redundant) without discretion as the economy falls into the downside of a cycle. For the CBO’s purposes, the agency measures automatic stabilizers not on their effects, intended effects [...]
The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke has escaped, largely, responsibility for the panic in 2008 mostly because there is no direct link between monetary policy and the housing bubble. The most stinging criticism that comes out of the era is Greenspan’s “ultra-low” interest rate setting for federal funds, but there is no smoking gun in the [...]
While this was meant to be anecdotal, giving the whole rise and fall of eurodollars an actual feel through actual published bank results, the more abstract collections of the derivatives world conforms very well with those singular sketches in JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. The BIS, for example, publishes its estimates for the give and take of the gross notional [...]
The early 1990’s saw the S&L’s fail on wholesale means but also to be displaced entirely by the GSE’s and securitizations of also wholesale monetarism. Indeed, when LTCM failed in 1998 rather than recognize the glaring limitations evident in the systemic pathology the Fed looked at it the way it wanted, preserving itself at the apex of political-economic planning and [...]
In April 2013, Janet Yellen gave a speech still as the Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve. Her topic was communication, fitting in that it was given to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She expressed the evolution in Fed policy as it had changed since the more direct if silent beginnings in the early 20th century. Not [...]
What I set about to demonstrate in Part 1 was the visible spectrum of the wholesale system. In other words, you can see balance sheets grow and distort, with money dealing along with it, but that doesn’t cover the full dimensions on how and why credit production, especially through securities, bloomed as it did. This is, in many ways, the [...]
I often write about the rise and fall of the eurodollar standard in very abstract terms, largely because most of what occurs there is hidden, opaque and/or terribly abstract. The difficulty is in trying to define and describe “money” under just such a pliable system, a task not easily solved by current conventions. For instance, it was the trend in [...]
GDP estimates for Q2 2015 have been rising in June, largely due to updates on consumer and household spending. The first, the Quarterly Services Survey (QSS) showed a somewhat higher spending pattern for financial services (the largest component), which pushed Q2 GDP forecasts (according to the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tool) to +1.4%. Last week, the strictly seasonally-adjusted “surge” in retail [...]
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