Ceremony and ritual are not just important concepts for priming and keeping faith, they are absolute essentials. There’s a reason why cult leaders make themselves appear - at every instance - indispensable while at the same time keeping their masses busy with nonsense. Can’t ever permit thinking too much lest the house of cards crash downward at the first slight [...]
Conventional wisdom has said for a long time that a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining output. Where this idea came from, who knows. It’s a shorthand that was put together over time derived from the folks at the NBER. This latter group has claimed the responsibility for being the “official” arbiter of every recession, having become the go-to [...]
It’s not necessarily a discrepancy so much as maybe looking at the same thing from a different point of view. China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) reports on, among other things, the widest definition of foreign assets being under its whole national umbrella. Yet, the agency publishes balances denominated not in CNY, either US$’s or SDR’s (hey, they can [...]
The Salvadoran colón is still technically legal tender in El Salvador. The country’s government under President Francisco Flores had passed the Law of Monetary Integration in 2000, taking effect on January 1, 2001. This legalization of the US dollar for domestic circulation didn’t specifically remove the colón from common purchases or prohibit its use; the country’s Central Reserve Bank just [...]
There are three letters you never want to see hit the Chinese news. Actually, it’s the same letter just repeated three times. If the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank and top bank regulator, ever decides to reduce or cut their RRR you know things are getting serious. And not in a good way.This, of course, won’t [...]
The 30-year US Treasury bond yield dipped below 2% today for the first time since early February. The unsurprising nasty “surprise” in the ISM combined with more concerning data especially surrounding China released over the long American holiday weekend have added more weight to fears the global economy has reached the limits of reopening. If we’ve already seen its best [...]
For the month of May 2021, China’s central bank reported almost exactly the same as it had in April (or March). In the case of foreign assets, as has become standard, nearly identical. Despite reflation dollar flows being described and talked about, they still haven’t reached the official PBOC balance sheet which after so many months of this simply reduces [...]
Ever since March 2020, GFC2, Federal Reserve officials from Jay Powell on down have been busy patting themselves on the back for their splendid performance during last year’s big event. Again, market-of-last-resort. It would’ve been much worse, they claim, particularly given what happened in the Treasury market itself which we are supposed to believe QE bailed out just in the [...]
When Ben Bernanke stood up in front of Milton Friedman (it was his 90th birthday) back in November 2002, what he told the co-author of A Monetary History was that the monetary account contained within its pages had become settled, the officially-accepted version of events. What had made the Great Depression truly prolonged and horrific had been the long-ago Federal [...]
Taking our limited repo example from Part 1 a step further still, in real-world operation a bank might put up any number of securities – including any it might have just that day obtained full title too – to secure financing all at once. Thus, there are groupings of securities over which the bank has varying degrees of control – [...]
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