Three-month LIBOR has just this month risen by a little more than 3 bps. That sounds like nothing more than a rounding error, beyond trivial, but considering it had only risen 3 bps prior going back to March the comparison of acceleration is what clearly matters. Up until August, the upward variability in LIBOR had been limited toward the longer [...]
It was another very heavy intervention in yuan last night for the PBOC, making that twice in just one week. The activity is so fierce as to be of similar proportions to the very tight Chinese New Year period, meaning that it is an understatement to say that the PBOC is under great strain. What is less defined, especially in [...]
To start this week, Ma Jun, chief economist for the PBOC, gave an email interview where he expressed his belief that the yuan will be more volatile but in either direction. Many still took those comments as if it were a veiled prescription toward devaluation. In the near term, it is more likely there will be "two way volatility," or [...]
China apparently shocked some people last week by allowing the Yuan to fall 3.5% against the dollar. I don't know why in the world they would be shocked since we've known for months - heck almost a year now - that capital has been leaving China. I wrote about it back in March so it isn't like it was exactly a [...]
By the behavior of the Chinese yuan itself, given the financial size here, we can readily assume that any “dollar” problem that is clearly causing the PBOC’s actions are sizable. Currencies throughout Asia are being roiled not unlike 1997 and oil prices sunk to a new “recovery” low. While that all suggests far away turmoil relevant only to those foreign [...]
It’s amazing what will be ignored or forgotten in order to try to explain the state of the world when it strays so far beyond bounded conception. Commentary views the state of economic world as wholly separate dots, disparate systems only tangentially connected through nebulous trade terms and hard currencies. The world was once that way, though perhaps even then [...]
Everything in dollar-denomination yesterday was lifted by the usual M&A debasement and quite sour data from China. The latter was taken as if there would be renewed “stimulus” in the near term. The “dollar” took a break from its recent destructive nature, as commodities rebounded as did currency proxies and even gold. Stocks in the US and elsewhere jumped and [...]
Going back well more than a year now, every time the PBOC takes some kind of action it is classified immediately as “stimulus.” Last July, the Chinese central bank opened its PLF to China Development Bank and it was heralded as a renewed age of traditional monetarism if in unfamiliar formatting. In November, the first rate cuts since 2012 were [...]
In another of the innumerable cosmic coincidences that so abound these days, producer prices in China have been in “deflation” since March 2012. Not only is that 41 consecutive months of falling prices (insofar as this index captures that effect), that month is ubiquitous as a trend demarcation in so many other places. It’s as if the Chinese economy and [...]
The problem with sentiment surveys is, as I am becoming a broken record, that they don’t often mean what they are taken to mean. At best, they are relative measures of changes and potentially, if captured and refigured just right, inflections. With innumerable problems encapsulated into not just their construction but the idea of a PMI in the first place, [...]
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