It was a poignant moment that has gone totally unappreciated. Lost in the noise about subprime mortgages, on August 9, 2007, what actually happened that day represented perhaps the best example of how things worked. Or suddenly didn’t. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary, I recounted the tale of BNP Paribas. You’ve heard of Lehman and Bear Stearns, countless [...]
You don’t always have to understand the minute details behind these things to gain a sense of what they mean. I’m talking about things like negative swap spreads and related. From the textbook view, a negative spread makes no sense at all. On the surface, it seems to suggest the market thinks financial counterparties are less risky than the US [...]
More than any conundrum in the bond market, the Federal Reserve has one on its hand much closer to home. Its home, anyway. The effective federal funds rate (EFF) has been stapled to IOER for each of the last fifty trading days. No variation whatsoever. EFF had converged with IOER back in October. A lot of ugly things began to [...]
In the chaotic days of the early “recovery”, those opposed to the Federal Reserve’s response largely fell into the wrong camp. The central bank had done too much, they claimed. Never mind how the first global panic in four generations had developed and then crushed the global economy, such deflation was over to be taken apart by rapid inflation if [...]
Inflation hysteria in some places hasn’t just faded, it has disappeared almost entirely. The old saying is that shooting stars burn out the fastest. One of the hottest systems was in Europe. The ECB, we were told, had done it. Even though QE hadn’t achieved anything of substance in its first or second year, the third was apparently the charm. [...]
Why don’t economists understand bonds? The long answer involves several detours into parts of Economics that have nothing to do with interest rates or even money. More so these places are dominated by discussions of stochastic calculus and partial differential equations. Thus, the short answer is: Affine models of the term structure of interest rates are a popular tool for [...]
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has for the past almost four years conducted its own assessment of consumer expectations. Though there are several other well-known consumer surveys, FRBNY adding another could be helpful for corroborating them. Unfortunately for the Fed, it has. The latest update for May 2017 suggests a considerable decline in forward inflation expectations, particularly those [...]
The federal funds rate holds no relevance to anything actually useful and meaningful. That has been the case for some time, though pinning down exactly when federal funds became irrelevant is a bit of chore (I personally view it when altering Regulation M in 1990 created a regulatory par with eurodollars). Even the FOMC admits how actual finance has passed [...]
The US Treasury Dept. released its awaited report on October 15 today. I started to read through its 72 pages but it became clear rather quickly this wasn’t anything but, frankly, junk. The ultimate message is simply one of “computers.” In other words, there is no discussion, apart from simple bland references here and there, about what really transpired on [...]
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