In March 2009, only two days after the exact bottom in US stocks, Alan Greenspan took the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare, declaratively, that the Fed was not to blame for the catastrophe. His “evidence” was based on this single supposition: The second, and far more credible, explanation [for the housing bubble] agrees that it was indeed [...]
The biggest challenge for the Federal Reserve in 2015 is going to be trying to convince everyone that it is meeting its dual mandate. That is true of every year, but this one is unique given the threats to undo ZIRP after more than six years of it. On the one hand, there is the “maximum employment” mandate seemingly arrived [...]
The primary monetary channel for “stimulating demand” has traditionally fallen through real estate. Mortgage finance is the largest private source of financialism, reaching directly to people’s personal economy. The price appreciation of houses and the availability of mortgage credit are seen by orthodox economics as the basis for marginal “demand” changes in a theoretical philosophy that prizes nothing but activity [...]
It has been lost to history now, but the first stirring of rational expectations theory was something like daylight savings time. “Experts” posited that there could be calendar effects lurking in behavior that might be exploited with the right kind of regulatory agenda and even interference in something so established as Thanksgiving itself. As Pat Horan at RealClearHistory details, FDR [...]
As the FOMC gathered only a week after October’s unusual UST “experience”, they faced an oddly familiar problem. The entire focus, at least externally, has been on how to exit extraordinary “accommodation.” Yet there is clearly a market difference between 2013’s discussions in that direction and 2014’s. As noted previously, credit markets in 2014 seem to be keenly aware that [...]
Next to Japan’s “unexpected” re-acquaintance with recession, the most serious indication of global economic distress has to be oil prices. And where commentary turned to “explaining” Japanese recession as related to a small attempt at fiscal discipline rather than the more debilitating flirtation with intentional debasement, convention surrounding the precipitous plunge in crude is desperately trying to direct toward “supply.” [...]
It began more than a week before the FOMC meeting, as eurodollars again anticipated what the mood would be surrounding whatever the FOMC might say. “Dollar” conditions had run down significantly where the entire curve shifted lower (looser) for the first two weeks of October as doubts grew about the economy in the US and pretty much everywhere else. Right [...]
“We don’t exactly know how it will work” should be stamped upon every message coming from the policymaking apparatus from this point forward, and then retroactively applied to every message in the age of risk and rate repression. Action in short-term money markets has heated up yet again, and that is not a positive statement toward vital function. To “exit” [...]
While the orthodoxy continues to try to reassure everyone that the economy is still moving to plan, revised innumerably over the years imperceptible as progress has been, there are signs that even mainstream outlets are at least starting to question whether or not that is actually preferable. Not a lot of dots are connected yet, and certainly not from A [...]
Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject [...]
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