It really is about abnormality. What I mean by that is, contrary to popular imagination fed by the Fed and other central banks, ever since 2008 the inflation paradigm has changed. The first global financial crisis (GFC1) has proven time and again how it wasn’t a one-off, and since it was a monetary breakdown (global dollar shortage) that’s been permanent [...]
This particular part of the hysteria is understandable, if thoroughly unconvincing. Forget the Fed and its bank reserves for moment, whatever those are now and then. The banking system is where it’s at, monetarily speaking, and it is the banking system which seems to have lost its handle on the money printing lever. If we’re focused beyond bank reserves and [...]
Fear of the ultra-inflationary aspects of fiscal overdrive. This is the current message, but according to what basis? Bigger is better, therefore if the last one didn’t work then the much larger next one absolutely will. So long as you forget there was a last one and when that prior version had been announced it was also given the same [...]
Japan is just the name of a group of large islands on the far side of the Pacific from the United States. For most people, there’s not much else more to say beyond the charm of weird, ofttimes masochistic tendencies embedded within the inscrutably fascinating Japanese gameshows. Maybe something about suicidal demographics. The financial media has done such a poor [...]
The ECB wants everyone to know that it is in control, and therefore has everything under control. Through an almost certainly carefully placed leak, European central bank officials have let it be known current monetary policy is practicing a kind of yield curve control. Not just the usual QE in terms of bond buying, but tailoring specific parameters within the [...]
It’s not just that there isn’t much inflation evident in consumer prices. Rather, it’s a pretty big deal given the deluge of so much “money printing” this year, begun three-quarters of a year before, that consumer prices are increasing at some of the slowest rates in the data. Trillions in bank reserves, sure, but actual money can only be missing. [...]
One of the concepts educators sort of snuck into the curriculum was something they called “moral suasion.” This term has meanings outside of Economics, but within the discipline it refers to one key element to the monetary policies of central banks. Basically, persuading markets or economic groups to act in the way officials want using rhetoric or threats without having [...]
Macroeconomic slack is such an easy, intuitive concept that only Economists and central bankers (same thing) could possibly mess it up. But mess it up they have. Spending years talking about a labor shortage, and getting the financial media to report this as fact, those at the Federal Reserve, in particular, pointed to this as proof QE and ZIRP had [...]
I’m not exactly sure how you translate the English word “hope” into Chinese, though Google’s translate algo tells me this is what it’d be: 希望. For the global economy to have any chance of just making next year less awful than it’s already predicted to be (by the optimists), the OECD declared China essential to the fanciful anticipation.As noted before, [...]
Japan Finance Minister Taro Aso, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, caused a global stir of sorts back in early June when he appeared to express something like Japanese racial superiority at least with respect to how that country was handling the COVID pandemic. For a country with a population of more than 126 million, the case counts and mortality [...]
Stay In Touch