It’s just Germany. It’s just industry. The excuses pile up as long as the downturn. Over across the Atlantic the situation has only now become truly serious. The European part of this globally synchronized downturn is already two years long and just recently is it becoming too much for the catcalls to ignore. Central bankers are trying their best to, [...]
Gordon E. Moore had co-founded Intel and so he had unique insight into the growing computer world. The revolution required a lot more (pardon the pun) computing power, which, Moore surmised, wouldn’t be too difficult to deliver. In 1965, he had observed that innovations were leading firms like his to be able to install double the number of transistors on [...]
There he was, the Fed Chairman stumbling through a question about headwinds and transitory factors. No, not Jay Powell in January 2020, this was Ben Bernanke in June 2011. The Fed had just downgraded its recovery forecasts (again) and some in the media weren’t getting it. After all, QE2. It was this enormously powerful monetary agent introduced for a second [...]
Between the summer of 2011 and February 2012, the unemployment rate experienced its largest half-year drop since the huge recovery that had been taking place in 1984. It was a very welcome sign that the US economy may have avoided becoming entangled in the global funding messes of 2011. Caught flat-footed, as always, Ben Bernanke’s Fed had ended QE2 at [...]
The IMF yesterday downgraded its forecasts for global growth as well as its real GDP estimates for all the big economy regions. The organization now thinks GDP growth might have amounted to 2.9% last year. Not only the worst year since 2009, that was down from April 2019 approximations of 3.6% and the original forecasts which always start out near [...]
For anyone thinking the global economy is turning around, it’s not the kind of thing you want to hear. Germany has been Ground Zero for this globally synchronized downturn. That’s where it began, meaning first showed up, all the way back at the start of 2018. Ever since, the German economy has been pulling Europe down into the economic abyss [...]
What relaunched Europe’s QE four months ago was the word “protracted.” Central bankers love its opposite, the term “transitory”, which they use quite often at every sign of a weakening economy. To be fair, economies ebb and flow all the time and we don’t want policymakers to jump at every minor swing one way or another. The problem, it seems, [...]
The year 2019 should be remembered as the year of repo. In finance, what happened in September was the most memorable occurrence of the last few years. Rate cuts were a strong contender, the first in over a decade, as was overseas turmoil. Both of those, however, stemmed from the same thing behind repo, a reminder that September’s repo rumble [...]
Back at the end of April, the FOMC and its dozens of staff members gathered around to talk policy as those people always do every six weeks or so. The agenda was quite full, with Jay Powell having had to switch from rate hikes to a Fed “pause” the few months before and none of them really sure why. Economic [...]
As France’s Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde objected strenuously to Ben Bernanke’s second act. Hinted at in August 2010, QE2 was finally unleashed in November to global condemnation. Where “trade wars” fill media pages today, “currency wars” did back then. The Americans were undertaking beggar-thy-neighbor policies to unfairly weaken the dollar. The neighbor everyone though most likely to be sponged off [...]
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