The growing sense of an economic cliff is based on three major factors, all of them in massive markets as opposed to manipulated and ill-suited statistics. The most obvious are oil prices and the UST curve (and related curve mechanics) as they have turned to prices and shapes not seen since the worst of the last crisis. The third, “dollar” [...]
Commentary has not been able to ignore changes in the Fed’s balance sheet mechanics with all the potential systemic shifts occurring as QE ends and the FOMC contemplates going even further. As I said last week, the total balance of bank “reserves” declined but not due to anything other than an operational test of the Fed’s Term Deposit Facility (TDF). [...]
One last of piece of evidence tying QE to liquidity disruptions in 2014, and the big buying “crash” of October 15, is the “flow” of “dollars” presented by TIC. My contention from last week was that the decay in systemic liquidity (repo) began not in May 2013 with the introduction of the “taper” concept, but a few months earlier when [...]
I think there remains a lot of misunderstanding about global finance simply because very few people, including every economist I have seen, realize the systematic arrangement has drastically altered way beyond orthodox comprehension. The eurodollar system that replaced the gold standard has even itself morphed broadly in the past few decades (especially around 1995), and then again in the post-crisis [...]
In July 2014, just as the dollar was beginning to tighten with what seems like an overly sensitive trigger, the US Treasury Dept’s Office of Financial Research published a paper by Zoltan Pozsar that attempted to map out the financial system as it actually exists (hat tip to W Kraus for sending it to me). The 67 pages of commentary [...]
Terminology and semantics have an important place in communication because we want to convey concise and accurate meaning as efficiently as possible. That is why I disdain the term “petrodollar” when speaking or writing about the global exchange standard that replaced gold in the Bretton Woods sense. The idea of a “petrodollar” conveys some of the “right” characteristics but leaves [...]
After enduring quite a bit of restlessness even into the early part of 2014, the Banco do Brasil (Brazil’s central bank) believed it had regained order in its currency “market.” Going back to the dramatic and global tightening episode around Chairman Bernanke’s taper threats in the middle of 2013, the real was caught in a very dramatic downdraft that has [...]
The pestilence of the wholesale “money” system, the eurodollar standard if you will, is that the “dollar” is no longer anything like one and that these “markets” for it are not directly observable. That leaves observers and interested parties to gloss and gleam related second or third hand accounts, hopefully piecing together the right parts at the right time enough [...]
The purpose of this exercise of examination of global funding mechanisms is to put together means for inference about the state of dollar funding as it relates to the systemic short (Part 1 here; Part 2 here). There is no direct path for observation; that is why nobody can figure out how big it is or how it has really [...]
The first part of this examination can be found here. At first, the rebound off the 2009 low looked as if there would be no lasting changes or damage to the eurodollar system, but subsequent events have shown that there is more than a little lingering dysfunction that does not sway or erase with central bank assurances (both psychological and [...]
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