The first half of 2021 was inundated with government helicopters, more QE’s, and then CPI’s put up with guarantees the “inflation” was going to continue for a long time. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s often hapless CEO, proudly declared US Treasuries beyond the touch of any 10-foot pole. With the economy on fire, he “reasoned”, who would ever want safe and [...]
We’ve got one central bank over here in America which appears as if its members can’t wait to “taper”, bringing up both the topic and using that particular word as much as possible. Jay Powell’s Federal Reserve obviously intends to buoy confidence by projecting as much when it does cut back on the pace of its (irrelevant) QE6. On the [...]
Central banking’s real monetary power comes from a different kind of printing. We’re all taught and told from the very beginning that it's derived from enjoying the money printer, the ability to stack currency at will. No. In actual fact, monetary policies are all money-less leaving “monetary” authorities to employ instead the press which prints words.Deciding which words, and more [...]
When the ECB’s leadership presented their first QE to the assembled media on March 5, 2015, there was a lot of the usual corporate-speak. It sure wasn’t fedspeak, the purposefully obfuscating wordsmithing of the kind made infamous by Alan Greenspan. No, on this occasion, to the contrary, Mario Draghi, the ECB’s President, wanted to be perfectly clear in what he [...]
JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon hasn’t produced an enviable track record opining on inflationary potential. He’s forever deeply entrenched in the inflation camp, and because he sits atop the corporate structure of one of the world’s biggest and most well-known banks, it does seem reasonable at first how his opinion on monetary matters is taken very seriously – despite repeatedly missing [...]
The Federal Reserve has allowed itself an image of a marshmallow when it comes to the banking system it is (one-third) charged with regulating. First and foremost, along with the two other (redundant) triplets, the OCC and FDIC, the US central bank is not a central bank at all; it is near exclusively a domestic bank regulator. And while “macroprudential” [...]
Putting some charts and data behind Friday’s extensive essay about bank reserves and inflation intended to further highlight some key parallels…The precursor event to yield caps being imposed in the United States actually took place during the Great Depression. Then – as now – officials at the central bank expected their “money printing” efforts to pay off in the reverse [...]
The Bank of Japan has been paying Japanese banks a supplement on loans they collateralize with the central bank. This program is not new, announced first during the depths of COVID earlier this year, but its growing popularity has demanded attention. In addition to this market “support”, in April BoJ added a bonus of 10 bps to each pledged loan.The [...]
Why is anyone surprised Christine Lagarde stepped in it? This is who she is, who she has been her entire career. The woman is a walking disaster, screwing up from one place only to be promoted into the next. Her Argentina debacle was merely the latest – before yesterday. In case you were distracted by events closer to home, the [...]
According to Eurostat last week, Europe’s win streak reached 27 quarters in Q4 2019. If you count winning solely by the sign in front of quarterly GDP changes, then Mario Draghi handed off to Christine Lagarde an expansion just one quarter shy of seven years. It’s supposed to be impressive. Lagarde, however, begins her tenure in very much the same [...]
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