Most people have at least a passing familiarity with the basic concepts of finance. These are intuitive aspects that count almost like Platonic qualities of “truth”, existing as almost transcendent reality upon which human construction is based. In this particular case I am talking about money and time value. The reason a yield curve takes the shape that it does [...]
Sovereign debt is the tangible pivot by which everything in Europe depends. That speaks not just to persistent fiscal imbalances that remain, years later, unresolved, but the unspeakable financial equivalent to a doomsday scenario. The damage to the European economy from the last financial panic is slowly being revealed (as with the unrequited and un-criticized promises of central banks), which [...]
China’s figures last week were not “helpful” to the “global growth” narrative, and now Japan and Europe have contributed their share of turning sentiment. It seems as if credit markets might actually be on to something with all this bearishness standing in stark contrast to stock markets that just don’t care about much except self-feeding participation and corporate indulgence. There [...]
With Europe reporting GDP, reactions have been somewhat varied. In some places, it was taken as not as bad as feared, while others were downright cheered by a lack of total collapse, as if that is now the standard for economic progress. Since GDP tends to be noisy in the short run, the major components, the economic base, continues to [...]
I’m not sure how much this can pass for shared wisdom, but somehow central bankers have become concerned about central bankers. This situation has been described and discussed ad nauseam since Japan first went full ZIRP in 1999. For all that supposed self-reflection, nothing has really changed except the rhetoric – and only recently. “This is a world which places [...]
Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher, coined the phrase “dismal science” in economics to describe his inability to get the slaves in the West Indies to conform to any rational order of thought about the subjects. Supply and demand never held that men should be so subjugated when in fact Carlyle believed, as so many “experts” did, that certain men should. The [...]
We have clearly entered unchartered financial and economic terrain, a sentiment that applies so broadly as to lose almost all meaning. In fact, the world has strayed off the beaten path for so long “we” have little memory of what “normal” actually feels and looks like. The latest figment toward that direction is the growing errors of orthodoxy as it [...]
The problem with European monetarism is not that it is trying to swim against the tide of fragmented “markets” and national boundaries that represent very real hurdles in terms of legal and systemic bottlenecks. For the most part, everything that the ECB has tried, including a great deal that predates the bright spotlight on Mario Draghi, has led to precisely [...]
We will find out Sunday if all the rumors are correct (and by how much) about a significant portion of European banks either failing or still with their “feet wet” after the usual comedy of the stress tests. You never really know with these types of weighty events, as there are all sorts of biases and trading considerations in where [...]
There are “portfolio effects” for individual investors, bank balance sheets and even interbank tendencies, or at least that is according to central bankers. The rather tame ECB announcement this week did highlight and clarify what Mario Draghi and his euro monetarists wish to accomplish. The new measures will support specific market segments that play a key role in the financing [...]
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