So much of the basis for monetary policy was put in place in the 1960’s study of the 1930’s. It has become commonplace simply to assume 21st century tactics as being directly lifted from the start of the Great Depression. One of the causes of that calamity was certainly restrictive money supply, but any dereliction on the part of the [...]
One of the consequences of last year’s junk bond blowup was, unsurprisingly, a dramatic decline in high yield gross issuance. The numbers were pretty stark. According to SIFMA, high yield gross issuance in Q1 was 60% less than Q1 2015, following Q4 which was 47% below Q4 2014. As the market has come back since March, for all sorts of [...]
Nominal disposable income in Japan fell 4.4% year-over-year in May 2016. In what can only be a sign of the times being far too familiar in Japanese, real disposable income was thus slightly better at “only” -3.9%. For all the hundreds of trillions in new Japanese bank reserves provided by so many QE’s I have lost count, “real” in Japan [...]
Back in September, the IMF issued a generic warning about EM corporate debt. The organization had estimated that total borrowing had exploded, from about $4 trillion in 2004 to $18 trillion in 2014; and perhaps even more than that. Concerns over such bloat typically focus offshore, and not without good reason. However, that understates the true degree of risk since [...]
You’ll have to forgive the Chinese if they view “global turmoil” as something far more than an esoteric financial concept to be debated by irrelevant monetary committees. US imports from China fell 4.3% year-over-year in May 2016, the third consecutive contraction and seventh out of the last eight months. With February’s 16% gain more a calendar/holiday illusion, especially since it [...]
Whether or not the Olympics in Brazil go off without any serious difficulties is actually an open question. There have been some athletes refusing to attend due to concerns over the Zika virus, while police and firefighters greeted travelers flying into the country through Rio’s airport with a sign that said “Welcome to Hell.” There are rumors reported in the [...]
In a regime where math acts as money, there are a few major potential chokepoints where shifts in math can become systemically important difficulties. In 2008, the most visible example was in repo haircuts, but the most devastating to the financial system certainly fixed income (MBS, in particular) correlation. The system could not survive rising correlation because nobody was prepared [...]
On November 4, 2010, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote his infamous oped for the Washington Post “welcoming” the world to a second round of quantitative easing. The very fact that there was a second iteration belied the whole point of “quantitative”, but the mistakes about “easing” have proven far more problematic. There wasn’t anything new or unusual in his [...]
It might be expected that monetary policy would fail to achieve its goal in attempting to manage the economy when it cannot even meet its own basic technical requirements. The main lever of Fed policy continues to be the federal funds rate even though it is entirely irrelevant, and has been for a long time. There is much more to [...]
The real nature of liquidity is not what you see today but what we might find when the going gets tough. Though it is an intangible concept (not that that hasn’t kept economists from trying to quantify it), we can reasonably assume that if overall liquidity today appears impaired under relatively benign conditions, it will be significantly worse as malignancy [...]
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