Why the big deal about the Fed’s new grand strategy? For one thing, as noted yesterday, there’s that whole lost decade which policymakers finally have acknowledged. They’ve quite a lot of catching up to do, but have waited for the most inopportune moment to…basically do more of the same things that hadn’t accomplished anything other than lose an entire decade.Already [...]
You have to laugh at the absurdity of the puppet show theater. A few months ago when bond yields backed up a little bit, as they do from time to time, everyone from Bond Kings to Dollar Crash-ists to Economists to just about every writer at the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg became fixated on yield caps (or yield curve [...]
To hear it told nowadays, you’d think that gold’s amazing run began when Jay Powell started cranking out bank reserves. Those telling the story equate those bank reserves to effective money printing, so it conforms to the conventional myth about gold’s relationship to the money supply (whatever that is). Throw in a federal government, every federal government, recklessly borrowing and [...]
It’s another one of those crisis-era programs, GFC1, the Fed probably hopes you never think too much about. Almost nobody noticed while the thing was operational. It was called the Supplementary Financing Program (SFP) which was thought up and initiated during the middle of September 2008 just two days after Lehman Brothers and AIG. Its purpose was, unbelievably, to drain [...]
Foreigners are dumping their Treasuries! The Fed is monetizing the debt! The federal government has gone insane! Mass fiscal hysteria!Yet, yields on these things are comfortably within sight of their record lows as prices have never been higher. Supply is very obviously off-the-charts, but so, too, must be demand. Every time we hear about “too many” Treasuries the market yet [...]
Gold at $1800 an ounce has a lot of people you wouldn’t expect lining up in Jay Powell’s camp. What else could it be, right? Bullion is an inflation hedge, that’s what everyone says. Therefore, quite obviously, skyrocketing gold must indicate the dollar destruction gold aficionados are always predicting. Unbeknownst to them, and likely to agitate the hell out of [...]
Back in the middle of 2018, this kind of thing was at least straight forward and intuitive. If there was any confusion, it wasn’t related to the mechanics, rather most people just couldn’t handle the possibility this was real. Jay Powell said inflation, rate hikes, and accelerating growth. Absolutely hawkish across-the-board.And yet, all the way back in the middle of [...]
In the initial days and weeks of the COVID (overreaction) shutdown, layoffs and furloughs were mostly a function of that very thing. A non-economic disruption. As time has gone on, however, continued joblessness can only be a function of economic factors meaning a huge problem (deflation) that isn’t being solved by time. Because of this huge “surprise” in employment data, [...]
What was stupidest about the past few months was how it was these guys who everyone was depending upon to make it all go just perfectly moving forward. Worse, those geniuses being held up as competent economic stewards practically reran the 2008 playbook line by line. What that said, more than anything, was that they had come up with zero [...]
The job, as Jay Powell currently sees it, means building up the S&P 500 as sky high as it can go. The FOMC used to pay lip service to valuations, but now everything is different. He’ll signal to all those fund managers by QE raising bank reserves, leading them on in what they all want to believe is “money printing” [...]
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