With funding markets and currencies showing pessimism once more with regard to the “dollar”, waiting for confirmation from TIC presentations is less than desirable. The Federal Reserve offers an alternate measure listed on its H.4.1 as a memoranda item. It tracks what the Fed holds in direct custody for foreign central banks and other “official” accounts and conduits. The holdings [...]
One of the primary pillars of even the tepid “recovery” of this cycle is undoubtedly auto sales. We can have a debate as to the influence of monetary policy in this arena, especially as auto loans have (along with student loans) been practically the only direct conduit of credit into the real economy. Clearly, despite the heavy flow there, auto [...]
With the FOMC throwing in the towel on the US “boom”, funding markets have knee-jerked back into the same trends as predominated during the prior liquidity events. In other words, extreme pessimism has once again intruded in eurodollars. The funding curve has exploded (imploded?) back to where it was at the early part of February, when everything was still just [...]
Ever since the price of oil became a major economic theme last fall, even before the now-ubiquitous “dollar” though they are essentially one and the same function, economists and especially those at the FOMC have been in a rush to reassure that the oil price collapse was both going to be short-lived and a huge benefit to consumers. One didn’t [...]
It’s certainly not quite the “butterfly effect” but the reality of the overall arrangements of the global economy is shockingly simple. The details, methods and interactions of the “dollar” can be incomprehensible at times, especially since there is no directly observable and thus plainly unambiguous data, but once the “big” moves entrench all that complexity recedes in importance (at least [...]
It seems to me as if there is growing nervousness in the otherwise unshakable cadre of economic commentators over the fact the economy so far in 2015 is not behaving. This is undoubtedly more than just the price of oil and the constant blurt of supply, supply, supply – in fact, oil prices no longer dominate much of the chatter [...]
The issue of bank hoarding has become nearly mainstream as the size of the move into UST is now too large to ignore. It wasn’t so much an issue last year, apparently, as there was less to suggest taking very pessimistic portfolio allocations was anything other than an anomaly of regulation. This year the idea of prudence as opposed to [...]
The function of recession is not just some negative numbers that appear from seemingly nowhere, though that is how convention sees it of “unforeseeable” trends and “shocks. It may take the NBER years in some cases to declare, officially, a cycle peak but that doesn’t mean there aren’t warning signs much closer to the event. Among them is, again, not [...]
We know that credit and funding markets took a nasty turn in December, but it wasn’t until economic data released just recently that we gained a better appreciation about why that might have been. In the relative blindness of “realtime” such market-driven bearishness could be self-contained within purely financial factors alone, and thus opens the possibility of ambiguity about why the [...]
China remains an export economy no matter how hard they try to convince the world they are moving otherwise. The idea of creating internal “demand” as a means to extricate marginal changes from everybody else is undoubtedly a good idea, even a noble one, but the reality of China as it exists top-down isn’t conducive for such a transformation. Further, [...]
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