Milton Friedman first proposed his “plucking model” of the economy back in 1964. In doing so, he said that any economy is sort of mean reverting, in that any setback it might experience, a recession or some such, is merely a temporary deviation from the prior established trend. In his own words (NBER, 44th Annual Report): Consider an elastic string [...]
The dominating feature during the last months and days of globally synchronized growth (Reflation #3, to you and me) wasn’t inflation nor growth. It was instead CNY. Taken at face value, the marvelous resurrection of China’s currency after 2014-16’s debacle (Euro$ #3, to you and me) did seem consistent with a global dollar system (eurodollar, to you and me) rebound.And [...]
Who would’ve ever guessed? Jay Powell flooded the world with dollars, “overseas” swaps and all, but more and more you get the impression he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. The Fed Chairman, of course, is never alone when it comes to these things. He’s plenty of company.Recall, for a moment, how the IMF in June 2018 “rescued” Argentina. Big, [...]
It’s just not fast enough. And with the labor market spitting out numbers across a broad economic cross-section that look increasingly tired suggesting an economy running out of momentum, there’s the added urgency of time. Late summer figures still aren’t close to where they need to be even though when you view them in isolation they can look tremendous.Start with [...]
Back in late July, the government of Ecuador opened negotiations with a particular set of what it called institutional bondholders. Like so many other nations, every other nation, Ecuador needs dollars and borrows them from global markets. Eurodollars, as in directly bank loans, those have been harder to come by post-2013. Eurobonds, however, they’ve been somewhat of a different story [...]
As one of Africa’s largest copper producers, it seemed like a no-brainer. Financial firms across the Western world, pension funds from the US or banks in Europe, they lined up for a bit of additional yield. This was 2012, still global recovery on the horizon – at least that’s what “they” all kept saying. Zambia did what everyone does, the [...]
It’s always something. There’s forever some mystery factor standing in the way. On the topic of inflation, for years it was one “transitory” issue after another. The media, on behalf of the central bankers it holds up as a technocratic ideal, would report these at face value. The more obvious explanation, the argument with all the evidence, just couldn’t be [...]
Back in early June 2018, the Brazilian real was in free-fall (again). Never bothering to explain why or what was happening, the country’s top central banker just gathered the media together in front of him confident in how what he’d say to its members would be reported as fact. As it was. Not just by Brazil’s press, either. Even if [...]
The term “balance sheet recession” is one that had come up more often a little more than half a decade ago. At the same time everyone at the Fed, especially Bill Dudley, was wondering why QE had kept coming up (way) short of every one of its goals, some of them began to speculate about this other thing. If the [...]
Bill Dudley was a key guy at the Fed for a very long time. It is very important to point this out. Not only did he hold two of the central bank’s most crucial positions, he held them during the institution’s most critical moments. Dudley was Manager of the system’s Open Market Account in August 2007. On the seventh of [...]
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