The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (TBAC) was established a long time ago in the maelstrom of World War II budgetary as well as wartime conflagration. That made sense. To fight all over the world, the government required creative help in figuring out how to sell an amount of bonds it hadn’t needed (in proportional terms) since the Civil War. A [...]
It was another pretty embarrassing day for the Federal Reserve and its policymaking body the FOMC. The latter voted, as expected, to raise the federal funds corridor (or double floor, if you can’t get over IOER fail) by another 25 bps. The long end of the Treasury bond market, however, was bid pushing yields down not up. There is a [...]
Back in September, the FOMC announced that it was in October going to start normalizing its balance sheet. The policy statement issued that day included all the usual qualifications of “solid”, “strengthen”, and “picked up.” The near-term risks to the economy, it was written, “appear roughly balanced.” Not all was well with the economic situation, however, as the central bank’s [...]
The nominal CMT yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury note hit its low on July 8 last year. It’s debatable, of course, as to what turned it around; I think “reflation” from there began in Japan and all those whispers of the “helicopter.” It didn’t really matter that the BoJ didn’t really consider the proposition, what did instead was [...]
Sometimes you just have to laugh. A lot has been made on the inside of LIBOR’s assumed demise. The suite of interest rates is not being discontinued really, merely relegated to the backbench. As usual, the rationale for doing so is perfectly sound: As noted by the Financial Stability Board’s Market Participants Group, there are many current uses of LIBOR [...]
In 1993, Stanford economist John B. Taylor wrote an influential paper that introduced the economics profession (statisticians, almost all) to what was later called the Taylor Rule. The need for such a “rule” was an unspoken outgrowth of monetary evolution. In the 1960’s and 1970’s long-established regression models estimating the influence of then-defined money on economic variables had broken down [...]
The American banking system had been primarily a domestic one throughout its early development. Despite, or because of, the rapid growth in the later 19th century, banking was orientated almost entirely inward to finance the needs of that growth. But as a growing national as well as industrial power, the US adopted several measures early in the 20th century to [...]
In July 2012, the LIBOR manipulation scandal broke wide and before Congress then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used it to cleverly cover up for his crisis actions (more so inactions). He told the Senate Banking Committee that the LIBOR system was “structurally flawed” before intimating it had been that way for some time. Asked if the rates calculated by the [...]
Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress in March 2007 that subprime was contained. He will rightfully be remembered in infamy for that, but that wasn’t the most egregious example of being wrong. Even putting it in those terms risks understating the problem and why it stubbornly lingers. Being really wrong is claiming that IOER will establish [...]
When Bear Stearns nearly failed, made to merge, in March 2008 it wasn’t really a surprise. Yes, markets were shocked by the demise of the ancient firm, one of the bulge bracket cartel which suggested surprise over the severity of it more than that things were going bad. For more than a year, starting in early 2007, Bear had been [...]
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