The market for bankers’ acceptances was one of the first tasks of the Federal Reserve. There was a flourishing financial trade in acceptances in sterling which was purely a matter of the British pound being something like the global reserve currency, at least for a vast portion of global geography. With the United States becoming an industrial and trading power, [...]
There does seem to be internal financing adjustments going on inside the arcane and cumbersome framework of CNY to US$. Whether or not that is desirable remains to be seen, but the case of the past few weeks suggests, and somewhat strongly, that the PBOC is again losing control. What it is almost certainly like trying to squeeze a balloon, [...]
China’s government or the PBOC moved to suspend three foreign banks from participating in cross-border currency transactions. From what I have seen, and nothing has been confirmed, rumors have suggested that Deutsche Bank was one of the three. The move has, as usual, created all manner of confusion in how to frame what the PBOC or Chinese regulators might be [...]
Before World War II, in Japan there were four large conglomerates situated as vertically-integrated family-centered monopolies. Called zaibatsu, they were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, and many other smaller rivals. Each group would not just own companies in all industries, they would also organize and contain an assimilated banking concern (horizontal integration) to carry out capital and funding needs for within [...]
For bond ratings agencies, finding a bottom is pretty much their job. In other words, they are supposed to map out and understand, as best as may be possible through regressions and equations, the forces that might define a worst case. By direct implication, a worst case probability is determined by at least some ray of hope, some perhaps buried [...]
Though most of Russia’s territory belongs in Asia, it would be difficult to characterize Russian finances as “Asian.” Most of the dirty work is done in the financial centers of Moscow, but in the past year and a half under the “rising dollar” paradigm, Russian financial existence may be more Asian than geography alone might permit. The similarities are perhaps [...]
This isn’t surprising, but events in China are accelerating. Just as the West heads into year-end coma, there is much to be concerned about on the other side of the Pacific. For, one, either the PBOC has taken off whatever means it has been using to suppress SHIBOR or the strain has become too much to bear. As much as [...]
The Fed’s control over money markets has always been tenuous, a myth more than anything, it just wasn’t so obvious at one time. That observation extends to its grasp of even basic operations, a spectacular fail revealed by its 2000’s treatment of the Discount Window. On January 9, 2003, the FOMC altered decades of monetary history by switching the Discount [...]
Now that the FOMC has announced its intentions, it has to sit back and wait to see if it can actually do anything. This is the direct consequence of using the federal funds rate as the primary target, as it is a dead market that nobody really uses anymore. The only reason the Fed is still leaning on federal funds [...]
Now that the FOMC has done it, we get to hear about how it was surely the “right” time for it. Unlike September, conditions are supposedly an order of magnitude more settled. That has given the policymaking economists the green light to make sure they start the normalization process before “overheating” becomes the central concern. With August a fading memory, [...]
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