It’s another one of those myths that gets repeated over and over because it has never been realistically challenged. Not in any public way. The Fed says its dollar swap lines, central bank liquidity swaps as they call them today, worked beautifully. They may not use that particular word to describe the results, but you are distinctly left with that [...]
According to the Federal Reserve’s calculations, the US dollar in Q1 pulled off its best quarter in more than twenty years - though it really didn't need the full quarter to do it. The last time the Fed’s trade-weighed dollar index managed to appreciate farther than the 7.1% it had in the first three months of 2020, the year was [...]
People quite often want to know what I have against the Fed’s swaps. To begin with, they are sourced by bank reserves. My co-host partner Emil Kalinowski likes to say these latter are the equivalent of laundromat tokens, an analogy I can at least get behind. They are monetary in appearance but of (extremely) limited use. Maybe a more comprehensive [...]
Technically, by showing one decimal place maybe this doesn’t exactly qualify. Then again, I was only half serious. When Mexico’s government reported earlier this week that auto production fell by almost 100% in April, I wrote it was suggestive of the great possibly lingering difficulties being forecast for the other side of this economic dislocation. Automakers, basically, aren’t buying the [...]
They merely repeat the words, as it is intended. With major fanfare and widespread praise, the Federal Reserve weeks ago had announced it was going to buy corporate bonds. Well, not actual bonds but ETFs. It hasn’t bought a single one of those, either, at least not until today and yet the program is being assigned the usual magical properties. [...]
There are two parts behind the inflation mongering. The first, noted yesterday, is the Fed’s balance sheet, particularly its supposedly monetary remainder called bank reserves. The central bank is busy doing something, a whole bunch of something, therefore how can it possibly turn out to be anything other than inflationary?The answer: the Federal Reserve is not a central bank, not [...]
It wasn’t entirely unexpected, though when it was announced it was still quite a lot to take in. On September 1, 2005, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the nation’s personal savings rate had turned negative during the month of July. The press release announcing the number, in trying to explain the result was reduced instead to a [...]
It was an absolutely mad scramble. Banking difficulties in the Fed’s sixth district, the Atlanta branch, had sparked an irresistible wave of panic which spread throughout the Eastern seaboard. By December 1930, it had reached the streets of New York City – the world’s monetary capital. On December 11, customer withdrawals had left the Bank of the United States with [...]
It’s nothing more than pedigree, having little to do with actual performance. Central bankers are given a level of respect and even admiration suited only to their job title. As such, they travel the world as honored guests to fulfill the insatiable demand for their takes on essential matters no matter how far off the mark.Only rarely is there occasion [...]
An internal combustion engine that is leaking oil presents a difficult dilemma. In most cases, the leak itself is obscured if not completely hidden. You can only tell that there’s a problem because of secondary signs and observations.If you find dark stains underneath your car, for example, or if your engine smells of thick, bitter unpleasantness, you’d be wise to [...]
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