It was only three years ago, so you’d think narratives today would at least try to account for relevant recent history. If that prior first fit of inflation hysteria had a birthdate, it would’ve probably been December 18 or 19, 2017. On the former, the US House of Representatives passed their version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA); [...]
ADP reports today that, for the fifth consecutive month, the labor market recovery everyone had hoped for has instead been transformed into something else entirely. According to the firm, private payrolls expanded by just 307,000 in November 2020 from October. That’s the slowest pace since July, and, most important of all, leaves the private US economy near 10 million short [...]
Twenty years ago, in November 2000, the Treasury Department changed one aspect of the way the government would sell its own debt. Auctions of these and other kinds of securities had been ongoing for decades, back to the twenties, and they had been transformed many times along the way. In the middle of the 1970’s Great Inflation, for example, Treasury [...]
Japan Finance Minister Taro Aso, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, caused a global stir of sorts back in early June when he appeared to express something like Japanese racial superiority at least with respect to how that country was handling the COVID pandemic. For a country with a population of more than 126 million, the case counts and mortality [...]
Speaking of Japan, it’s not difficult to figure out why Japanese banks might seek some small pittance from diving back in the choppy waters of eurodollar redistribution. Conditions at home, particularly since the middle of last year (right when the big turn Tokyo dollars came up), have been, to put it mildly, way less than ideal. Politicians listening to central [...]
For the past couple months, the foreign official sector has been able to go back to buying (net) US Treasuries again. Not a lot, but it’s a change from the prior period when overseas central banks and governments would dependably dump tens of billions each month. Contrary to convention, this kind of buying corresponds to rising rates, the reflationary stuff. [...]
Where is it, Chairman Powell? After spending months deliberately hyping a “flood” of digital money printing, and then unleashing average inflation targeting making Americans believe the central bank will be wickedly irresponsible when it comes to consumer prices, the evidence portrays a very different set of circumstance. Inflationary pressures were supposed to have been visible by now, seven months and [...]
The number illusion is a logical fallacy of sorts, an appeal to the authority of what looks like objectivity. You can’t argue with math. While that’s true, in social sciences there is the continued absence of real proofs which dominate the hard sciences. Newtonian physics works as a worldview because the numbers throughout history have always checked out.When an Economist [...]
Trump or Biden? Will we even know tomorrow? Many purport that markets are leaning one way or the other, typically based on whichever market leaning puts whatever preferred candidate in the most favorable light. Everyone’s a winner in the run up. I don’t think there’s a lot of trading that goes with either candidate. As things stand right now, from [...]
Physical cash vs. bank reserves. Quality growth vs. quantity. Xi Jinping vs. everyone not onboard with Xi Jinping. All three contests are actually very simple and straightforward – once you let go of the strong economy, money printing Federal Reserve nonsense. As to the last of the trio, Emperor Xi has been awfully keen this year to redo government flags.Communists [...]
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