Then-President Trump was eager to talk in May 2017. Having been elected in 2016 by giving voice to what he called the “fake” unemployment rate on the campaign trail, and therefore mobilizing millions of the disaffected uncounted by that official ratio’s official definitions, it was enough to put him just barely over the top. To continue with the agenda, to [...]
For a short while, with reflation being traded in almost every corner of the global bond market, the Bank of Japan started to get “those” questions again. Almost of the humble brag variety. A few years ago, Japan’s central bank had widened what it considered to be an acceptable trading range for its 2016 QQE addendum of Yield Curve Control [...]
The benchmark 10-year US Treasury has obtained some bids. Not long ago the certain harbinger of bond rout doom, the long end maybe has joined the rest of the world in its global pause if somewhat later than it had begun elsewhere (including, importantly, its own TIPS real yield backyard). Even nearer-in inflation expectations have rounded off at their current [...]
Like a child fixated on a shiny new toy, I was enthralled by trading in WTI futures on Monday. There are times when end-of-day closing prices just don’t capture the full extent of what actually goes on during the several hours of any regular session, and yesterday was certainly one of those times. We’ve been on top of front-end contango [...]
Economists’ R*, or R-star, is a fiction. It’s one that they came up with after-the-fact to try to explain why their policies didn’t actually work the way policymakers had initially promised. While in public, officials still speak glowingly of each QE, one after another after another, in private they know it deserves absolutely no praise. Study after study has shown [...]
In theory, it goes like this: QE or any sort of large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) undertaken by a central bank is needed during times of trouble in order to reduce interest rates in general. Buying bonds seems like it would lower yields, and lower yields mean more accommodative credit, therefore a boost to the real economy.So simple, straightforward, and intuitive, [...]
All the signs were there, starting with the fact that the Fed and ECB together had supposedly the flooded the world with digital money yet a palpable “something” was really off. Ben Bernanke’s central bank had unleashed both ZIRP and QE, the latter of which had finished up a couple months before. In Europe, Jean Claude-Trichet’s outfit was “highly accommodative” [...]
Long end UST yields on the rise with reflation-y factors taking more of a hold, last year’s postponed YCC flirtation is almost certain to be rekindled over the weeks ahead. We’ve been told how it’s really simple, meaning low interest rates are stimulus and this must be maintained without fail. But what’s really been responsible for all the failing?When I [...]
Nevada is, by all accounts and accountants, in rough shape. Very rough shape. An economy overly dependent upon a single industry, tourism, in this case, is a disaster waiting to happen should anything happen to that industry. Pandemic restrictions, for instance.Nevadans cannot afford the government spending they “have” without a gaming industry attracting visitors at full throttle. Desperate, the state’s [...]
Japan is just the name of a group of large islands on the far side of the Pacific from the United States. For most people, there’s not much else more to say beyond the charm of weird, ofttimes masochistic tendencies embedded within the inscrutably fascinating Japanese gameshows. Maybe something about suicidal demographics. The financial media has done such a poor [...]
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