Talking with my colleague Joe Calhoun yesterday, he was eager to share with me something he found in the (virtual) pages of the Wall Street Journal, a perfect sign of the times. In a story about a group of nuns in Germany taking their financial future into their own hands, Joe couldn’t help but shake his head at what surely [...]
The yield on the 10-year US Treasury closed at around 1.68% today, but judging by the haughty commentary surrounding global bond markets you would be forgiven if you thought it was 2.68%. Since the low in July around 1.37%, that +30 bps apparently seems like it to many people. Going back to the end of QE2, the idea that rates [...]
The Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index (LMCI) fell to contraction again in August. After rebounding in July for the first positive reading of 2016, the LMCI dropped to -0.7 in the latest update. As usual, revisions have reshaped the levels of indicated problems throughout the past two years, but overall the trend remains. From this view of the labor [...]
Just a little over a year ago, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) released its purchasing manager index for the services sector for August 2015. Though the level was down slightly from July, coming amidst the immediate aftermath of the “shocking” financial quakes starting in China and spreading to markets all over the world, the 59.0 non-manufacturing PMI was welcome [...]
It is a basic element of logic that if A = B and B = C, then A must also equal C. In terms of action, if I do a thing and that thing always leads to a predictable outcome, not seeing that outcome causes one to question whether or not one actually did that thing. In other words, A [...]
Jeffrey Snider: All Signs Point to Global Systemic Reset
In January 2011, FRBNY began surveying primary dealers in order to try to gain a better understanding of how normalizing policy after two large (in their terms) programs of quantitative easing might affect money and bond markets. The banks were asked a series of questions, an array that has evolved over time, mostly about expectations for the future track of [...]
On November 4, 2010, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote his infamous oped for the Washington Post “welcoming” the world to a second round of quantitative easing. The very fact that there was a second iteration belied the whole point of “quantitative”, but the mistakes about “easing” have proven far more problematic. There wasn’t anything new or unusual in his [...]
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