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 [...]
In mid-December 2019, before the world had heard of COVID, China’s Central Economic Work Conference had released a rather startling statement for the world to consume. In the West, everything was said to be on the up. Central banks had responded, forcefully, many claimed, more than enough to deal with that year’s “unexpected” globally synchronized downturn.This view had been punctuated [...]
Japan Finance Minister Taro Aso, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, caused a global stir of sorts back in early June when he appeared to express something like Japanese racial superiority at least with respect to how that country was handling the COVID pandemic. For a country with a population of more than 126 million, the case counts and mortality [...]
If it shows up at the Federal Reserve, you can pretty much bet everything you own that it was tried out at the Bank of Japan first. And if it was the brilliant brainchild of someone at the BoJ, then you’re guaranteed it failed spectacularly. Which means, obviously, the “ideal” technocrats at the Fed intentionally copied something they knew had [...]
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