More than any conundrum in the bond market, the Federal Reserve has one on its hand much closer to home. Its home, anyway. The effective federal funds rate (EFF) has been stapled to IOER for each of the last fifty trading days. No variation whatsoever. EFF had converged with IOER back in October. A lot of ugly things began to [...]
In the continued absence of regular data, as the US federal government attempts to get back up to speed before the next lull, it is perhaps appropriate to continue on with this week’s parade of anecdotes. Here I’ll discuss three of them, each seemingly unrelated to the others. To begin, we start with Chinese robots. It is the age of [...]
The US Treasury Department’s update of its Treasury International Capital (TIC) report for October contained no surprises. In many ways, it was ironically uninteresting given the constant excitement that had happened during that particular month. It was, in a word, a mess for global markets. Liquidations struck throughout the world and more than a month later we are still struggling [...]
Markets today celebrated more bad news out of Germany. Misunderstanding especially in stocks is par for the course, not that it’s much better outside of them. German officials are laying the groundwork to change the nation’s banking laws so that it’s two largest banks, really “banks”, can more easily combine. If it should ever come to that. The major sticking [...]
Whenever a big bank is rumored to be in unexpected merger talks, that’s always a good sign, right? The name Deutsche Bank keeps popping up as it has for several years now, this is merely representative of what’s wrong inside of a global system that can’t ever get fixed. In this one case, we have a couple of perpetuated conventional [...]
You need only go back a little less than two years for an example. In later 2016, Deutsche Bank was a huge problem everyone was discussing if only because they couldn’t avoid it. Despite “reflation” then gripping much of the world, the German institution stood out for all the wrong reasons. Those were easily dismissed as nothing other than an [...]
Before Mario Draghi took over the ECB, he was head of the Bank of Italy. In between, Draghi was also Chairman of something called the Financial Stability Forum (FSF). This latter organization was created in 1999 “to promote international financial stability through enhanced information exchange and international cooperation in financial supervision and surveillance.” Draghi was appointed to lead the effort [...]
It’s kind of a cheap shot to go back and rehash corporate statements from way back in the past. Still, when the topic is banking and why the monetary system refuses more than intermittent and minor progress, it’s worth the revisit. What’s different now than before 2008, really August 2007, is far more than regulation. It’s the attitude that’s changed. [...]
China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported last week that the official manufacturing PMI for that country rose from 51.6 in October to 51.8 in November. Since “analysts” were expecting 51.4 (Reuters poll of Economists) it was taken as a positive sign. The same was largely true for the official non-manufacturing PMI, rising like its counterpart here from 54.3 the month [...]
I could understand it if its track record was spotty, or partially mixed. But the level of denial runs deep and wide with the yield curve. There is a growing chorus of nonsense, really, which is attempting to spin the flattening as some kind of benign technical rotation that through illogical convolution equals the opposite of what is obvious. Let’s [...]
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