Janet Yellen and her colleagues would like to welcome you, not unlike Tim Geithner’s 2010 expedition in this area, to the recovery. They have removed pretty much all language that would make you think there was anything like lingering destructiveness or erosion. In doing so, they make it very plain that they want you to believe that they will be [...]
There may be something to December after all. It was credit markets that shifted downward (bearish yield curves and credit spreads) dramatically around the end of November and the first few days of December. Given the persistence of large players moving credit and funding markets, this may not be all that hard to fathom with the close proximity of credit [...]
I mentioned yesterday in looking at the behavior of gold that it seems as if the “dollar” has entered a bit of a pause in its wider destructive reality of late. Maybe that coincidence with the SNB’s dramatic alteration offers an explanation for it, with renewed focus on the European end of eurdollars, or that these are merely complimentary of [...]
The main problem with looking at the financial world from a “dollar” funding perspective is that there really is no such monolithic existence. The funding conditions in Russia may be very different than those of Swiss banks; they also may be far too similar. Given the impossibility of direct observation, being left outside and searching for interior clues that bubble [...]
The FOMC continues to posture as if the economy is good enough to allow the first “tightening” in policy since Alan Greenspan. If we have learned anything from the era of shadow finance and the global eurodollar standard, it is that in these unsettled times the true “money supply” of bank balance sheet mechanics behaves of its own accord. In [...]
The inflection points of the past year and a half or so have become waypoints by which to mark the progress toward seemingly darker days ahead. In many respects, as I tried to express earlier today, this is nothing new not just in recent history but in troubling comparison to far worse fates. Those specific dates have taken on added meaning [...]
There is more than a passing interest in the 1937 retrenchment or what amounted to a “depression within a depression.” Numerous large-scale similarities abound between what occurred in the middle of the 1930’s and what is shaping up in the middle of the 2010’s. That makes for reasonable study about the very core and basic elements of finance that seem [...]
Turning attention to that last bastion of monetary surety, equities, the oil slump might be the greatest challenge yet to the non-stop stock escalator. Earnings especially for the S&P 500 are being revised lower as energy companies weigh on results. And while there may be a tendency to dismiss energy as its own problem, there is much deeper unwinding underneath [...]
Whatever bearishness existed prior to December, credit markets clearly shifted beyond to a heightened state of concern. That was not lost on the FOMC internal discussion regardless of what they state publicly, as the action in credit has taken now to levels unmatched by anything seen in the past five years – and it’s not like the past five years [...]
In light of what I detailed yesterday about the real reason the Fed is proclaiming economic success and an end to ZIRP, today’s minutes reveal a good deal of internal discussion leading toward that idea. The first part being that there is no wage growth today, and thus this notion of “transitory” non-inflation being nothing more than faith: Although a [...]
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