The payroll report for August 2017 thoroughly disappointed. The monthly change for the headline Establishment Survey was just +156k. The BLS also revised lower the headline estimate in each of the previous two months, estimating for July a gain of only +189k. The 6-month average, which matters more given the noisiness of the statistic, is just +160k or about the [...]
One day after reporting a slightly better number for Q2 GDP, the BEA reports today that there is little reason to suspect it was anything more or lasting. The data for Personal Income and Spending shows that the dominant condition since 2012 remains in effect – “good” quarters, or whatever passes for one these days, are the anomaly. There still [...]
Alice M. Rivlin was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve during its absolute apex. Nominated to that position in 1996, she stayed as number two to Alan Greenspan until 1999. During those years the central bank, and its central bankers, would become greatly admired for what was widely perceived as pure technocratic skill. The extended economic boom, with low inflation [...]
What makes a stock bubble is really two parts. Most people might think those two parts are money and mania, but actually money supply plays no direct role. Perceptions about money do, even if mistaken as to what really takes place monetarily from time to time. In fact, for a bubble that would make sense; people are betting in stocks [...]
In Ian Fleming’s 1959 spy novel Goldfinger, he makes mention of the Moscow Rules. These were rules-of-thumb for clandestine agents working during the Cold War in the Soviet capital, a notoriously difficult assignment. Among the quips included in the catalog were, “everyone is potentially under opposition control” and “do not harass the opposition.” Fleming’s book added another, “Once is an [...]
Part 1 is here. The real clue as to what was going on monetarily was provided in early 2008 not by a Federal Reserve statement about some new program it was hastily putting together (except by proxy of what it meant for conditions in private wholesale markets that the Fed thought it necessary to hurriedly arrange some new liquidity program, [...]
I’ve never understood the myth of central bank dollar swaps. They are automatically placed in the category of QE or IOER, perhaps because very few seem to understand what was really happening with them (as well as outside of them). The Fed expands its balance sheet which everyone assumes is the same as expanding either base money or something like [...]
Many if not most people were looking at Janet Yellen’s Jackson Hole speech hoping for some hint or clue as to her “hawkishness” or “dovishness.” As I’ve written before, that’s the wrong to look at the Federal Reserve and its policy. They want to raise rates simply because it’s been one hundred and nineteen months since they started lowering them. [...]
Orthodox monetary theory tells us that central banks matter, a lot. Monetary policy is supposed to be the difference in everything from economy to currency. If one central is doing one thing and another central bank something different, it is presumed the only necessary information to infer what markets and therefore economies might do in response. The Federal Reserve is [...]
The world of eurodollars is always going to be hidden. What goes on, really goes on, often sees no light of day. The most basic financing transactions are typically bilateral, meaning that the only people who really know the terms and the reasons are the two counterparties engaged. That is also true if one of those counterparties just happens to [...]
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