Count me among the bond vigilantes. On the issue of supply I yield (pun intended) to no one. The US government is the brokest entity humanity has ever conceived – and that was before March 2020. There will be a time, if nothing is done, where this will matter a great deal.That time isn’t today nor is it tomorrow or [...]
This is not a man who’s comfortable thrust into a position of leadership. Say what you want about Ben Bernanke, and there’s a lot that still needs to be said, he at least carried on with the arrogance through thick and thin (almost entirely the latter). Jay Powell sounds like a boxer who just realized the lightweight he thought he [...]
The monetary mouse. After years of Mario Draghi claiming everything under the sun available with the help of QE and the like, Christine Lagarde came in to the job talking a much different approach. Suddenly, chastened, Europe’s central bank needed assistance. So much for “do whatever it takes.”They did it – and it didn’t take.Lagarde’s outreach was simply an act [...]
After years of futility, he was sure of the answer. The Bank of Japan had spent the better part of the roaring nineties fighting against itself as much as the bubble which had burst at the outset of the decade. Letting fiscal authorities rule the day, Japan’s central bank had largely sat back introducing what it said was stimulus in [...]
It was an absolutely mad scramble. Banking difficulties in the Fed’s sixth district, the Atlanta branch, had sparked an irresistible wave of panic which spread throughout the Eastern seaboard. By December 1930, it had reached the streets of New York City – the world’s monetary capital. On December 11, customer withdrawals had left the Bank of the United States with [...]
Following along the same top-down model, what unites central bankers and socialists is equality. Handing over significant authority to either results in everyone being equally impoverished. And, therefore, those very authorities fighting over minute scraps so as to display some sense of accomplishment.In October 2015, safely nested within the cozy confines of Brookings, being paid handsomely to opine on matters [...]
It was chaos. Rumors of not one but two large European banks being pushed to the brink. Money market funds worried about breaking the buck rapidly pulling cash out from under any global name. The FOMC debating what would’ve been a repo-like bailout, even though $1.6 trillion of bank reserves had been “added” to the system. What was most damaging [...]
What set me off down the rabbit hole trying to chase modern money’s proliferation of products originally was the distinct lack of curiosity on the subject. This was the nineties, after all, where economic growth grew on trees. Reportedly. Why on Earth would anyone purposefully go looking for the tiniest cracks in the dam?My very first day on the job, [...]
It seemed like an odd, counterintuitive market reaction to what was total chaos. First the news of Lehman Brothers followed closely by AIG, panic gripped every corner of the global marketplace. Toward late September 2008, the stock market would meltdown (the main part of GFC1 that most people associate with the term) in a wave of liquidations due to a [...]
Hold all the congratulations. Jay Powell is, with a huge assist from the financial media, trying to pre-empt what comes next by taking a premature victory lap. The Fed isn’t just your central bank it is your friend. The amount of pure propaganda being put out lately is understandable if still disgusting. March was a good month to include [...]
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