When the ECB’s leadership presented their first QE to the assembled media on March 5, 2015, there was a lot of the usual corporate-speak. It sure wasn’t fedspeak, the purposefully obfuscating wordsmithing of the kind made infamous by Alan Greenspan. No, on this occasion, to the contrary, Mario Draghi, the ECB’s President, wanted to be perfectly clear in what he [...]
Six months ago, the US was still reporting 226K new cases of COVID a day, a rate that would peak in the first half of January at over 300k. Daily deaths also peaked in those first two weeks of the new year at over 4000. The economy was still struggling to recover, most restaurants surviving on takeout traffic, and no [...]
Ever since March 2020, GFC2, Federal Reserve officials from Jay Powell on down have been busy patting themselves on the back for their splendid performance during last year’s big event. Again, market-of-last-resort. It would’ve been much worse, they claim, particularly given what happened in the Treasury market itself which we are supposed to believe QE bailed out just in the [...]
Taking our limited repo example from Part 1 a step further still, in real-world operation a bank might put up any number of securities – including any it might have just that day obtained full title too – to secure financing all at once. Thus, there are groupings of securities over which the bank has varying degrees of control – [...]
Denmark’s Niels Bohr considered himself more of a philosopher than a physicist, yet he contributed so much to the groundbreaking approach that became the basis for quantum physics. At the same time Germany’s Werner Heisenberg was writing the famous paper on “his” uncertainty principle, Bohr was purportedly on vacation thinking up the deeper consequences and meaning of all its implications.Upon [...]
A dead rat would’ve easily explained the foul odor, though it wouldn’t have ended the matter. The smell was real, the cause still yet to be identified in the mainstream view. For the bond market, anyway, it was a process of discovery which began with an unexpected stench of something much bigger and more profound than any single or simple [...]
Long-term Refinancing Operations (LTRO) became a standard non-standard monetary policy tool in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) toolkit late in 2011. A second confounding (global) banking crisis had struck yet again catching global policymakers with their pants down, this one seemingly centered directly upon Europe. On December 8, 2011, amidst constant rumors (probably real) that two of the major European [...]
This goes back to the earliest days of the Federal Reserve. In 1912 and even before, in order to sell the skeptical public on another central bank – the nation’s third, and first in three-quarters of a century - in what was already going to be an uphill battle, Congress demanded that this thing be called something other than a [...]
Words have meaning for a reason, to convey precise ideas easily and readily understood by the reader or listener. If you use the term “stimulus”, as its root already suggests you’d expect something to be stimulated by whatever is being classified using this specific grouping of letters/sounds. Context rounds out the meaning.For the last twenty years, you’d have been wrong [...]
The US Treasury Department announced today that it has completed an auction of 20-year bonds. Quite unlike the one 7s auction – you know, that one – this particular bond sale was positively uninteresting. Like all the rest of the bills, notes, and bonds since February 25, there an overwhelming number of bank dealers and other participants some of whom [...]
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