Inside the Treasury Department, the Office of Financial Research has grown to 225 employees, though that may be just a concerning (bureaucracy) as it is laudable (serious effort). Incorporated by Dodd-Frank, the agency inside the agency is dedicated to “Wall Street Reform”, at least that was the heading upon its old website. At its new virtual location, OFR projects its [...]
It has been lost to history now, but the first stirring of rational expectations theory was something like daylight savings time. “Experts” posited that there could be calendar effects lurking in behavior that might be exploited with the right kind of regulatory agenda and even interference in something so established as Thanksgiving itself. As Pat Horan at RealClearHistory details, FDR [...]
In looking at the “portfolio effect” of monetary policy, monetarists always see benefits without costs. The one exception in recent years has been Jeremy Stein of the FOMC, who is no longer a member. It was his statement in February 2013 about “reach for yield” that seems to have set off something odd in the policy apparatus. Some of that [...]
“We don’t exactly know how it will work” should be stamped upon every message coming from the policymaking apparatus from this point forward, and then retroactively applied to every message in the age of risk and rate repression. Action in short-term money markets has heated up yet again, and that is not a positive statement toward vital function. To “exit” [...]
For all the supposed and assumed disparities between US monetary policy direction and that in Europe, credit markets in both locations seem to be far too much in lock-step agreement. That would suggest a few implications, the first of which is that the global financial system does not really consist of many closed systems with only minor connections as assumed [...]
There is a slow but steadily building sense that there is more than a little problem with systemic liquidity as it stands right now. While not quite mainstream, there has been some minor attention devoted to repo problems and now credit trading. An article in Bloomberg today does a pretty good job of sketching out the real world as it [...]
There is an interesting dichotomy taking shape in credit markets, including those around the globe (that will be a separate post). Some of this, I think, relates to what FOMC member Richard Fisher related today about concerns over asset bubbles. I think the Economic Times of India summed him up the best: Already there are signs of financial excess in [...]
Since we are now in the middle of the final month of a quarter, checking repo stats shows what we have come to expect of a fragile liquidity system. Once again, repo fails spiked sharply in the latest weekly statistics from FRBNY as primary dealers and the Fed’s own repo “fix” fail to affect the “resiliency” that FOMC members appear [...]
In the rush to make QE’s taper and the follow-on “forward guidance” appear more data-related than of due concerns about the structural (and ultimately philosophical) flaws in the economy, the regressionists of the Federal Reserve have come up with more regressions. The problem was always Ben Bernanke’s rather careless benchmarking to the unemployment rate. In fact, based on nothing more [...]
The stock market rallied hard into Janet Yellen's speech Friday at Jackson Hole, expecting some epiphany I suppose about the future course of monetary policy. What we got instead was Labor Market Dynamics And Monetary Policy, the purpose of which I can only suppose was to bore the market to death. Economics is not the most exciting subject in any [...]
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