NOTE: This is really the second half of an earlier missive on the changing nature of the eurodollar system post 2014-16. While it’s not absolutely necessary to read the first here, it’s probably a good idea. The reason nothing ever goes in a straight line is that first everything is always changing. How and why are questions we often don’t [...]
On April 29, 2011, the US benchmark oil price (WTI) surged above $113 per barrel. It wasn’t just American oil prices, either, as other benchmarks around the world were on a huge run. It was the highest for crude oil in three years, going back to the weeks immediately following Lehman. At that price, more so the parabolic trajectory, it [...]
As with other prices, if we are interested in what’s going on with dollar exchange values (not be confused with eurodollars, the shadow conditions behind everything) we have to start with the futures market. Unlike UST’s or WTI, the one standing for the dollar index, or DXY in this case, isn’t particularly massive. That may be an unfair comparison given [...]
On November 29, 2009, the government of Dubai shocked the world with a statement acknowledging trouble with its debt load. Dubai World, a government-owned conglomerate that was the conduit for the country’s oil-fueled debt extravaganza that had literally transformed the nation, asked for a “stand still” from creditors in order to extend maturities until May 30, 2010. It came while [...]
There’s nothing especially special about 2.62%. It’s a level pretty much like any other, given significance by only one phrase: the highest since 2014. It sounds impressive, which is the point. But that only lasts until you remember the same thing was said not all that long ago. Back last March, the 10-year yield had then, like now, broke above [...]
A decade ago, the financial world was alive. I don’t mean alive in the same way much of humanity was at the fall of the Berlin Wall or on VE Day in 1945. Rather, people at that particular moment had their eyes pulled opened just a bit for the first time in a very long time, maybe in the same [...]
Goldman Sachs reported FICC revenues of just $1 billion in Q4 2017. That was the lowest for the Wall Street firm, technically a bank, since it converted from properly a securities business to one during the worst of 2008. That was 50% less in “bond trading” than Goldman had produced during Q4 2016. You start to get the sense that [...]
What determines the price of gold? It seems like it should be an easy question to answer, but gold more than perhaps any other asset often mystifies in its behavior. Part of the reason is mainstream, orthodox Economics and its practitioners who have waged an intentional war on the metal for more than a century and a half. Demonizing it [...]
For quite a long time I obsessed over November 20, 2013. It was a day that for the vast majority of humanity was like any other, nothing too far out of normal and certainly nothing that would seem to mark it for remembrance. But in my realm of yield curves and interest rate swaps, the things that tell us a [...]
American central bankers and economists aren’t alone in their Phillips Curve nightmare. They are joined by others practically everywhere else around the world. In Europe, for example, the unemployment rate there continues to fall while inflation keeps on misbehaving in its meandering. Unlike the US, however, the Europeans don’t have the luxury of burying millions of prospective workers in other [...]
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