First Bernanke, now Yellen. As I wrote earlier today, there is a growing tendency to revise economic history at least as it applies to official actions. Ben Bernanke defends QE from the perspective of 2009 forward, as if 2008 was all just someone else’s problem irrelevant to the world that came after. In effectively resigning from the Fed Chair position [...]
It's hard not to put all emphasis on missile tests and other serious forms of sabre rattling. Even doing so, as the bond market may be doing right now, however, misses the underlying. Everything at the moment traces back to mid-March, which in hindsight was a very eventful month in full far away from the Korean peninsula. Take, for example, [...]
According to orthodox theory, if interest rates are falling because of term premiums then that equates to stimulus. Term premiums are what economists have invented so as to undertake Fisherian decomposition of interest rates (so that they can try to understand the bond market; as you might guess it doesn’t work any better). It is, they claim, the additional premium [...]
You can understand to some small degree economists’ collective confusion about inflation. They believe in wage dynamics, where a recession through mass layoffs creates slack and thus depresses wages. The recovery in a period of robust growth re-employs those unfortunate workers, and after enough time when that slack is reduced or even eliminated wages accelerate again (increased competition for labor). [...]
The American banking system had been primarily a domestic one throughout its early development. Despite, or because of, the rapid growth in the later 19th century, banking was orientated almost entirely inward to finance the needs of that growth. But as a growing national as well as industrial power, the US adopted several measures early in the 20th century to [...]
In October 2015, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Bill Dudley admitted that the US economy might be slowing. In the typically understated fashion befitting the usual clownshow, he merely was acknowledging what was by then pretty obvious to anyone outside the economics profession. Dudley was at that moment, however, undaunted. His eye was cast toward the unemployment rate and that was [...]
Brexit, Trump’s election, even the Bank of Japan rumored to be thinking helicopter. Last year was the year of thinking differently and therein was hope. No matter how many times some markets and especially media blindly accepted the “stimulus” or “recovery” judgments of economists over the years, by 2016 and the near-recession globally that accompanied a “rising dollar” that nobody [...]
Real Gross Domestic Product expanded by 2.54% in Q2 2017, below most estimates including the final one from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model. That latter method was close once again in its final days (+2.8%), but earlier in the quarter was predicting GDP growth of 4.3%. That would have been like what many people were thinking after another awful first [...]
Ten years ago yesterday, Bear Stearns sent a letter to shareholders of two specific hedge funds that it sponsored. Whenever anyone brings up the name now, you immediately know where this is going. That wasn’t the case in 2007, however. Whatever the world may think of Bear in hindsight, a decade ago it was a highly reputable firm. These two [...]
What is most tragically ironic about the last decade is that the people who are supposed to have been in charge are the same people claiming it could never happen. Ben Bernanke, for example, made his career on studying the Great Depression. Using Milton Friedman’s brand of primitive monetarism as a base, he and others like him developed the modern [...]
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