When their paper came out in January 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff put a number on bond vigilantism as it had been known in prior history. The idea behind investor fickleness was simple and intuitive: profligate governments who finance their ill spending ways by borrowing will literally end up paying the price once the exceed common sense. And when [...]
For a short while, with reflation being traded in almost every corner of the global bond market, the Bank of Japan started to get “those” questions again. Almost of the humble brag variety. A few years ago, Japan’s central bank had widened what it considered to be an acceptable trading range for its 2016 QQE addendum of Yield Curve Control [...]
At the very least, you have to recognize the correlation. If you aren’t willing to consider causation, in part, there’s troubling coincidence in every place around the world between huge government deficits and less growth (therefore the constant inflation "puzzle"). You can argue that the former causes the latter, and that’s absolutely a valid case; when things get rough, neo-Keynesians [...]
It was very cold across much of the United States in February in parts of it that usually don’t freeze up – literally and figuratively. While electricity in Texas garnered most of the attention, the weather was just as bad in many other states across the typically mild wintering South. Undoubtedly, last month was an exception to the seasons’ status [...]
The Aussies weren’t the first to drive into the YCC channel. That “honor” belonged instead where it always does: Japan. The Japanese had also pioneered yield curve control just like they had for practically every single element behind post-crisis monetary policy everywhere else around the world. It’s always a safe bet that if some central bank somewhere starts doing something [...]
Japan is just the name of a group of large islands on the far side of the Pacific from the United States. For most people, there’s not much else more to say beyond the charm of weird, ofttimes masochistic tendencies embedded within the inscrutably fascinating Japanese gameshows. Maybe something about suicidal demographics. The financial media has done such a poor [...]
Sticking with Europe, central bankers want and expect higher inflation because that would confirm an economy strong enough – and monetarily sufficed – to sustain success. It’s the sustainability which has been lacking; the global economy since the first global (euro)dollar shortage never able to do more than lurch between downturns and the absence of downturns (reflation).Without enough monetary oxygen [...]
If you tally up the amount of local government debt and add it to the total owed by Japan’s central government, at the close of fiscal year 1991 it wasn’t too bad. The Japanese had always been fiscally responsible especially when compared to any of that nation’s big economy peers. In those early days of the “lost decade”, the balance [...]
They were never very specific to begin with, even in Ben Bernanke’s infamous November 2010 Post op-ed covering the start of QE2. Officials like to keep it purposefully vague as a kind of dry powder, a margin for error. If bureaucrats become too specific, the public would reasonably hold them to their own standard being laid out. The point behind [...]
Between November 1998 and February 1999, Japan’s government bond (JGB) market was utterly decimated. You want to find an historical example of a real bond rout (no caps nor exclamations necessary), take a look at what happened during those three exhilarating (if you were a government official) months. The JGB 10-year yield had dropped to a low of just 77.2 [...]
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