The 3-month Treasury bill’s equivalent yield has plunged, absolutely plunged. It was 1.45% last Thursday. Today? All of 45 bps. A one-hundred bp drop in six trading sessions. One hundred. Six days. Rate cuts, right? Sure, that’s the premise. Like eurodollar futures, the front end of the yield curve is saying that there are more of them coming. The Fed’s [...]
Everyone who lived through the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) remembers the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, if not the name itself. The law had authorized TARP (among other things). It was passed during the messiest part of the panic, being signed into law on October 3, 2008. You can always tell what is not going to happen by whatever [...]
The repo story especially as it is told from the TIC perspective is our main emphasis currently. However, there are other odds and ends in the series that deserve some separate attention if not to the same level. The dollar system is more than collateralized lending, and this will include a few items that I’m going to point out for [...]
Why haven’t US Treasury yields exploded higher? Sure, they are, at the long end, up from their lows set in late August when the rate for the 30-year long bond reached all the way down to a new record. The winds of sentiment have shifted, benefited by globally coordinated (not quite synchronized) monetary “stimulus” as well as a healthy dose [...]
Is the global economy on the mend as everyone at least here in America is now assuming? For anyone else to attempt to answer that question, they might first have to figure out what went wrong in the first place. Most have simply assumed, and continue to assume, it has been fallout from the “trade wars.” That is a demonstrably [...]
Just in time for more discussions about repo, the Federal Reserve delivers. Not in terms of the repo market, mind you, despite what you hear bandied about in the financial media the Fed doesn’t actually go there. Its repo operations are more RINO’s – repo in name only. No, what the US central bank actually contributes is more helpful data. [...]
The biggest thing about September’s repo rumble wasn’t the double-digit GC rate(s), it was the timing. Beginning on the Monday the day before the FOMC’s regular policy meeting, Jay Powell couldn’t accomplish what he had set out to. The Fed’s Chairman wanted what was the second rate cut in the series to be a more placid one. A confirmation, of [...]
There it was sticking out like a sore thumb right in the middle of what should have been the glory year. Everything seemed to be going just right for once, success so close you could almost feel it. Well, “they” could. The year was 2014 and the unemployment rate in the US was tumbling, the result of the “best jobs [...]
There’s trouble brewing in a particular sector of the corporate bond market. It’s not really new trouble, merely the continuation of doubts and angst that have existed for more than a year already. What’s different now is that it is finally causing more open disruptions, and thus sparking our interest as to what it might mean well beyond this specific [...]
It’s not the level of bank reserves. It never was. QT was always a distraction. As I’ve said from the very beginning, the same thing the Fed’s researchers (rather than top policymakers) will say you if you ask them, the level of bank reserves only tells us what the Fed is doing. It does not, and will not, describe anything [...]
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