The military phase was an all-out joke. Carlos Castillo Armas had fewer than 500 men as his “invasion” force. Yet, with only that many he had expected to take back the entire country. More surprisingly, he succeeded. Lt. Colonel Armas had previously participated in the 1944 Guatemala uprising that had forced Jorge Ubico from power. As a supporter and close [...]
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 [...]
Anna Jacobson Schwartz often gets buried under the mountains of study Milton Friedman conducted on his own. Contrary to what some, perhaps many, might think, Friedman didn’t write A Monetary History by himself. Anna Schwartz was his co-author for what would become one of the most important volumes of economic scholarship of the entire 20th century.Pretty much every central bank [...]
Can we please dispense with all notions that monetary policy works? Specifically balance sheet expansion via any scale asset purchase programs. Nowhere has that been more apparent than Japan. Go back and reread all the promised benefits from BoJ’s Big Bang QQE that were confidently written in 2013. The biggest bazooka ever conceived has fallen short in every conceivable way. [...]
It’s really not hard to appreciate why markets are freaking out right now. The economic narrative is, and has been, all wrong. Jay Powell says that faraway overseas pressures had taken just a little off what had been awesome economic growth. Despite what had become an obvious drag on trade and manufacturing, the unemployment rate, to Powell, spoke softly to [...]
When Mario Draghi sat down for his scheduled press conference on April 4, 2012, it was a key moment and he knew it. The ECB had finished up the second of its “massive” LTRO auctions only weeks before. Draghi was still relatively new to the job, having taken over for Jean-Claude Trichet the prior November amidst substantial turmoil. The non-standard [...]
The Federal Reserve added the word “symmetric” to its inflation goal for a reason. Back in May 2018 when it was made official officials made quite a big deal out of it. It was for two reasons, actually, both of them intertwined in the way Economists believe the economic system is supposed to work; and the central bank’s place in [...]
There he was, the Fed Chairman stumbling through a question about headwinds and transitory factors. No, not Jay Powell in January 2020, this was Ben Bernanke in June 2011. The Fed had just downgraded its recovery forecasts (again) and some in the media weren’t getting it. After all, QE2. It was this enormously powerful monetary agent introduced for a second [...]
Why is everyone so angry? How can socialism possibly be on such a rise, particularly among younger people around the world? Why are Americans suddenly dying off? According to one study, two-thirds of millennials are convinced they are doing worse when compared to their parents’ generation. Sixty-two percent say they are living paycheck to paycheck, with no savings and no [...]
While the world tries to digest the latest in geopolitics, as well as guess what could come next with them, on the topic of the economy the TIPS market registered a notable high yesterday. The 5-year breakeven rate, the difference between the “real” yield on the 5-year TIPS and the nominal yield for the 5-year US Treasury Note, was pulled [...]
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