Milton Friedman first proposed his “plucking model” of the economy back in 1964. In doing so, he said that any economy is sort of mean reverting, in that any setback it might experience, a recession or some such, is merely a temporary deviation from the prior established trend. In his own words (NBER, 44th Annual Report): Consider an elastic string [...]
What the hell is a bank reserve? Is it money? Since its very creation is a byproduct of concerted central bank action, the thing sure sounds like it has to be. As we know only too well since 2008, the financial media will uniformly call these things and the creation of more of them “money printing.” If everyone says…Not only [...]
What was stupidest about the past few months was how it was these guys who everyone was depending upon to make it all go just perfectly moving forward. Worse, those geniuses being held up as competent economic stewards practically reran the 2008 playbook line by line. What that said, more than anything, was that they had come up with zero [...]
Another 2.1 million Americans have filed this week with their state governments in order to determine their eligibility for unemployment insurance. That brings the 10-week disaster total for these initial jobless claims to an enormous 40.8 million. How did it get to be so many, and why, as states are opening back up, is it continuing in the millions all [...]
If there’s been one small measure of progress, and a needed one, it has been the mainstream finally pushing commentary into the right category. Back in ’08, during the worst of GFC1 you’d hear it all described as “flight to safety.” That, however, didn’t correctly connote the real nature of what was behind the global economy’s dramatic wreckage. Flight to [...]
Much has been made about the repo market since mid-September. Much continues to be made about it. The question is why. It is now near the middle of December and repo looks dicey despite repo operations and a not-QE small-scale asset purchase intended to increase the level of bank reserves. Always the focus on “funds” which may be available. It [...]
I’ve said it all along; focusing in on bank reserves would leave you dazed and confused. It’s just not how the system works. After all, as I pointed out again not long ago, “our” glorious central bank had the audacity to claim that there were “abundant” reserves during the worst financial panic in four generations. "Somehow" despite that, it was [...]
When central bankers use the word “financial” in an economic context, they mean exclusively stocks. Maybe that’s somewhat appropriate given how bonds are so often treated as monetary equivalents. Then again, if that is the case in the official view, how does anyone reconcile bonds with anything? Economy or money? The hard answer is that officials don’t really care about [...]
By far, the biggest problem in Economics is that it has no sense of itself. There are no self-correction mechanisms embedded within the discipline to make it disciplined. Without having any objective goals from which to measure, the goal is itself. Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase talked about this deficiency in his Nobel Lecture: This neglect of other aspects [...]
During the first quarter of 2008, as Bear Stearns teetered on the edge of illiquidity, foreign holders of US$ financial assets contributed $9.3 trillion to US credit markets. According to the Fed’s Z1, the Financial Accounts of the United States, it tells us that’s the amount they held in possession from outside the American geographical boundary. Considering at the same [...]
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