According to one research company, new Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was disgusted and angry at his press conference yesterday. The firm, Prattle, employed facial recognition software to track Powell’s expressions throughout his inaugural press conference. By their count, he was disgusted 36 times, angry 41 times, and expressed contempt another five. Powell conveyed joy on a mere four instances. [...]
There may come a time not too much further down the road when Brexit will have been not quite forgotten but placed into a second tier of European disintegration. In that top level, if it should continue, would reside all on its own Itexit. The Italians not the Britons will goad the question of the euro, and therefore the whole [...]
For a very long time, they tried it “our” way. It isn’t working out so well for them any longer, so in one sense you can’t blame them for seeking answers elsewhere. It was a good run while it lasted. The big problem is that what “it” was wasn’t ever our way. Not really. The Chinese for decades followed not [...]
In early September 2007, just a month after the eurodollar system broke and still weeks before the FOMC would finally see the need to do something, anything, private equity firm Carlyle Group added six new “senior investment professionals” intending on making investments in global banking and insurance. The timing was, well, suspect. Among those added to the firm was Randal [...]
Effective June 10, 2014, the European Central Bank cut the interest rate it paid on its deposit account to less than zero. That instrument in forming the floor for what is a money market corridor in European policy, it was the world’s first major NIRP experiment. Europe’s economy had by GDP been growing again for three straight quarters by then [...]
Imagine you live in a terrific neighborhood backed right up to a large wilderness. This heavily forested area has inside of it grown up a tremendous amount of underbrush. The local government, concerned for your property as well as those of your neighbors, starts making noises about taking care of the land before it dries out and a wildfire starts [...]
Once the sick man of the global economy, Europe’s system had roared back in 2017. According to the narrative, everything is right right now on the Continent. Manufacturing couldn’t possibly be any better, and the ECB forced into “emergency” monetary measures for longer than almost anyone else (except, as always, Japan) is talking confidently about winding everything down. We are [...]
You find lots of tortured arguments about the state of the economy, largely because the premise starts with the boom and then seeks to find it. If it isn’t currently visible in the data, there is unusual and unearned confidence that the data will have to change in the near future (rather than the past three times we’ve been through [...]
Brazilian stocks closed out January on an impressive run. Like stock markets all over the rest of the emerging market economies, Brazil’s has been on fire. The Sao Paolo Bovespa stock index had stumbled a bit in the middle of December, coinciding with a drop in the real against the dollar in that fit of global illiquidity, but between December [...]
For GDP, one big piece that’s missing, or what’s kept it at a lower rate than in the comparable 2014 period, is inventory. Three and four years ago, American businesses couldn’t get enough. They piled into it at a record pace. The reason they did was almost surely Janet Yellen, or at the very least the mainstream economic projections that [...]
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