What we know about what’s going on in Hong Kong is limited. That’s a real shame because I have no doubt what has been transpiring is important for a lot more than Hong Kong and the short run. The connections are too obvious for it to run any other way. I’ve been asked several times to diagram or further explain [...]
This is the Year of the Dog, or it will be starting tomorrow across Asia. Tonight marks the opening of celebrations for China’s Spring Festival Golden Week. These weeklong breaks in Chinese contributions to the global system have over the past few years rarely been so uneventful. Their absence has been noted both good and bad; the very worst of [...]
In February 2013, the Chinese Golden Week fell late in the calendar. The year before, 2012, New Year was January 23rd, meaning that the entire Spring festival holiday was taken with the month of January. The following year, China’s New Year was placed on February 10, with the Golden Week taking up the entire middle month of February. For economic [...]
It used to be a big deal, the kind of move that would itself move markets all over the world. Very quietly, JPY has been trading higher over recent weeks and has reached a level of appreciation we haven’t seen since those rocky days in early September. Only then, a rising yen (falling dollar) was a sign of bad things, [...]
The advent of open and transparent central banks is a relatively new one. For most of their history, these quasi-government institutions operated in secret and they liked it that way. As late as October 1993, for example, Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress intentionally trying to cloud the issue as to whether verbatim transcripts of FOMC meetings actually existed. Representative [...]
Goldman Sachs reported FICC revenues of just $1 billion in Q4 2017. That was the lowest for the Wall Street firm, technically a bank, since it converted from properly a securities business to one during the worst of 2008. That was 50% less in “bond trading” than Goldman had produced during Q4 2016. You start to get the sense that [...]
What determines the price of gold? It seems like it should be an easy question to answer, but gold more than perhaps any other asset often mystifies in its behavior. Part of the reason is mainstream, orthodox Economics and its practitioners who have waged an intentional war on the metal for more than a century and a half. Demonizing it [...]
While the Western world was off for Christmas and New Year’s, the Chinese appeared to have taken advantage of what was a pretty clear buildup of “dollars” in Hong Kong. Going back to early November, HKD had resumed its downward trend indicative of (strained) funding moving again in that direction (if it was more normal funding, HKD wouldn’t move let [...]
I suppose it’s easy to look at gold and see only fear. It is, after all, the ultimate currency hedge. Therefore, if the price is rising there is probably a good chance fear over monetary considerations is, too. The opposite interpretation, then, would appear to be just as straightforward, but it’s often complicated by the mechanics of wholesale global eurodollar [...]
Why would any central bank try to disguise the fact that it is being highly accommodative in its own money markets? That would be a strange place to start, made all the more so by the further observation the same central bank is perfectly happy if you thought it was doing the opposite. Cryptic introduction aside, it is obvious I [...]
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