Before the financial disconformities of 2013 can be allowed to rest in the annals of financial history, I think there is still one more piece that needs to be analyzed in the context of where we are now. Convention about liquidity disruptions is again leading back to Dodd-Frank and Basel, rightly so, but that isn’t enough to fully capture the [...]
Inside the Treasury Department, the Office of Financial Research has grown to 225 employees, though that may be just a concerning (bureaucracy) as it is laudable (serious effort). Incorporated by Dodd-Frank, the agency inside the agency is dedicated to “Wall Street Reform”, at least that was the heading upon its old website. At its new virtual location, OFR projects its [...]
If “investors” have notoriously short attention spans, then surely those in and of Europe are making a case to be classified as something entirely new, different, and worse. It is now just one day shy of six months ago that the latest central bank schematic was unleashed to the universal cheer of “markets” and economists alike. The ECB wasn’t fooling [...]
As the Eurozone absorbs yet another economic blow, the urge to engage in even more historic debasement via the ECB has heightened, to say the least. The talk about a European “QE” is near endless, as that is about all that is left for them to do. That is itself a powerful statement, lost upon those that are calling for [...]
It has been lost to history now, but the first stirring of rational expectations theory was something like daylight savings time. “Experts” posited that there could be calendar effects lurking in behavior that might be exploited with the right kind of regulatory agenda and even interference in something so established as Thanksgiving itself. As Pat Horan at RealClearHistory details, FDR [...]
Adding to the repo observations from this morning regarding illiquidity and more importantly gathering risk aversion, the behavior of corporate bonds and spreads matches that overall sketch very closely. The key point is how different the corporate bond space, like the UST curve, has behaved in 2014 in relation to 2013. In past periods just prior to recessions, you see [...]
As the FOMC gathered only a week after October’s unusual UST “experience”, they faced an oddly familiar problem. The entire focus, at least externally, has been on how to exit extraordinary “accommodation.” Yet there is clearly a market difference between 2013’s discussions in that direction and 2014’s. As noted previously, credit markets in 2014 seem to be keenly aware that [...]
Part 1, with the introductory framework, is here. Prior to the crisis, the Basel rules “allowed” (if not downright encouraged since it was bankers that really wrote the rules through regulatory proxies) bank assets to be divided into “buckets” in order to calculate reserve ratios. The entire premise of reserve ratios, Tier 1 capital and all that, was to measure [...]
There is still a lot of what I think is misleading commentary about a couple of very important topics recently. In Europe, there is an overdrive by the ECB to get banks to lend to people and small businesses. That may be an ocean away with a currency difference in between even that, but what the ECB is doing is [...]
Apparently St. Louis Fed President James Bullard is aiming toward the myth of the FOMC as “data dependent.” It wasn’t all that long ago that he suggested a pause in rate “normalization” as credit markets were signaling the “dreaded” disinflation appearance. A few weeks is all it has taken to change his mind and put the monetary world right back [...]
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