I have to agree with my colleague Joe Calhoun. Everyone thinks the Fed is (over)reacting to the stock market drop in December. There’s a little bit of truth in it, reading so many FOMC transcripts as I have you get the unmistakable sense the S&P 500 is unofficially included on the policy dashboard. In the early part of 2007, policymakers [...]
It was a tense exchange. When even politicians can sense that there’s trouble brewing, there really is trouble brewing. Typically the last to figure these things out, if parliamentarians are up in arms it already isn’t good, to put it mildly. Well, not quite the last to know, there are always central bankers faithfully pulling up the rear of recognizing [...]
A Return To Normalcy In the first two years after a newly elected President takes office he enacts a major tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthy and significantly raises tariffs on imports. His foreign policy is erratic but generally pulls the country back from foreign commitments. He also works to reduce immigration and roll back regulations enacted by his [...]
A year ago, central bankers were over the moon. From those in the US to those in Europe, with Japanese officials in between, they really thought they had it. There wasn’t much basis for the belief, mind you, merely the fact that positive numbers were registering in all those places at the same time. Like some old Three Stooges movie, [...]
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 [...]
As I wrote yesterday, “In the West, consumer prices overall are pushed around by oil. In the East, by food.” In neither case is inflation buoyed by “money printing.” Central banks both West and East are doing things, of course, but none of them amount to increasing the effective supply of money. Failure of inflation, more so economy, the predictable [...]
The US federal government is shut down and certain economic data accounts are being left to go without scheduled updates, things like US trade provided by the Census Bureau. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more watched series aren’t among the forgotten, however. The monthly payroll report would be compiled and released even during a nuclear attack. Yes, it really is [...]
We’ve got to change our ornithological nomenclature. Hawks become doves because they are chickens underneath. Doves became hawks for reasons they don’t really understand. A fingers-crossed policy isn’t a robust one, so there really was no reason to expect the economy to be that way. In January 2019, especially the past few days, there are so many examples of flighty [...]
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. Buddha Review It's that time of year again, time to cast the runes, consult the iChing, shake the Magic Eight Ball and read the tea leaves. What will [...]
We’ve seen all this before, almost exactly the same. Back in the middle of 2011, European officials remained fully confident even though things were already working backward. The ECB had in May 2010 “bailed out” markets as well as PIIGS, or so the media claimed. All that was left was time. On their side was Brent oil. Jean-Claude Trichet, Europe’s [...]
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