Updated statistics from the People’s Bank of China shed some light on changing money conditions in RMB. The Big 4 State-owned banks have been the primary liquidity conduit for all policies and activities going back to 2014. These institutions had been since the middle of 2016 increasingly squeezed as to excess funding available to be forwarded into money markets. This [...]
There isn’t much data available on the mechanics of lending or the other side of it borrowing. It’s a topic of interest nonetheless given the crucial role (sadly) of debt in determining the marginal economic direction (second derivative). A financialized economy is a drag without credit growth. One of the more encouraging signs on that account was an acceleration of [...]
Europe is as we all are. Ben Bernanke wrote a few years ago that his tenure at the Fed must have been a success in his view because the US economy didn’t perform as badly as Europe’s. As usual, this technically true comparison is for any meaningful purpose irrelevant. For one, the European economy underperformed before 2008, too. Second, after [...]
At the end of March, the European Central Bank (ECB) offered a second round of bank financing. Dubbed TLTRO’s, T for “targeted”, the program offered banks a chance to obtain direct funding for up to four years at an incredibly low rate. European banks in TLTRO2 were allowed up to as much as 30% of their outstanding eligible loan books [...]
As world “leaders” gathered in Davos in January 2016, they did so among financial turmoil that was creating more economic havoc than at any time since the Great “Recession.” Having seen especially US QE as the equivalent of money printing, their focus was drawn elsewhere to at least attempt an explanation for the contradiction. They initially settled on the Fed’s [...]
It is surely one of the primary reasons why many if not most people have so much trouble accepting the trouble the economy is in. With record high stock prices leading to record levels of household net worth, it seems utterly inconsistent to claim those facts against a US economic depression. Weakness might be more easily believed as some overseas [...]
For the very few in the mainstream of economics who venture further back in history than October 1929, they typically still don’t go much last April 1925. And when they do, it is only to further bash the gold standard for its presumed role in creating the conditions for 1929. The Brits under guidance of Winston Churchill made a grave [...]
It wasn’t the introduction of statistics that led to the dire state of “science”, rather it was the jettison of common sense in favor of, and the total deference to, statistics. This was not a single event or a clean break, of course, as it happened slowly over decades. But in the 21st century what is often talked about and [...]
Looking back it almost sounds like a completely different world. In the end, however, the world hasn’t changed, perceptions have. On May 10, 2012, German newspaper Spiegel reported that Bundesbank’s (Germany’s central bank) chief of its economics department, Jens Ulbricht, testified in the German parliament that German inflation was likely to be, “somewhat above the average within in the European [...]
Last week, the National Bureau of Statistics in China released what seemed like import levels that suggested “stimulus” was finally paying off and the economy had struck bottom. Among these more glowing results was an absolute surge in the importation of oil, which was blindly parroted as if Chinese demand due to the expected economic revival were the cause. Instead, [...]
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