As additional comparison for the current state of European credit, as you can easily get lost in the train wreck, I thought it interesting to include separately a wider perspective. I’m sure what I present below will make “sense” to someone at the ECB or one of the other central bank confederates in the context of monetary economics as it [...]
If the ECB is deliberately trying to prove how little efficacy it still may hold, they are doing an excellent job at it. There has been nothing but QE, QE and more QE in Europe since the New Year, which in the past might have at least courted some significant positive thoughts. If you recall back in September, at the [...]
Payroll Friday lived up to its recent billing, offering those who see the economy as booming their headlines while providing nothing beyond that by which to confirm it. There is maybe a growing sense, given market action (especially bonds), that the headlines are becoming less “moving” and that this disparity has been internalized more so than at any time in [...]
Whatever bearishness existed prior to December, credit markets clearly shifted beyond to a heightened state of concern. That was not lost on the FOMC internal discussion regardless of what they state publicly, as the action in credit has taken now to levels unmatched by anything seen in the past five years – and it’s not like the past five years [...]
In light of what I detailed yesterday about the real reason the Fed is proclaiming economic success and an end to ZIRP, today’s minutes reveal a good deal of internal discussion leading toward that idea. The first part being that there is no wage growth today, and thus this notion of “transitory” non-inflation being nothing more than faith: Although a [...]
The Fed is simply making it up as it goes, with nary a concern about being questioned on what is really disingenuousness. That starts with oil prices as there have been a number of Fed officials rushing to embrace them as some kind of “stimulus” that nobody outside a monetary magician (redundant) could perform. Orthodox economics despises “deflation” to its [...]
It may be progress in some sense, but we have apparently shifted beyond the “unexpected” stages of the economy. Disappointing data, as with the crude oil collapse, is now being termed “temporary.” That was the case with almost all the data this week, including factory orders, all of which was disappointing and thus “temporary.” But with domestic demand picking up, [...]
With everything that is supposedly going in the right direction right now, the US economy alone in booming out jobs and GDP, the last word you would expect to find attached to analysis of retailer performance during the Christmas season is “dismal.” The final numbers for the year have yet to be tallied, but the anecdotes have been trickling out [...]
If I had to define the recovery period that developed after the trough in the Great Recession, it would have ended sometime in the middle of 2011. Up to that point, there was almost a uniform behavior in financial and even economic accounts (though, on the economic side, there was much left to be desired). It was by no means [...]
The biggest challenge for the Federal Reserve in 2015 is going to be trying to convince everyone that it is meeting its dual mandate. That is true of every year, but this one is unique given the threats to undo ZIRP after more than six years of it. On the one hand, there is the “maximum employment” mandate seemingly arrived [...]
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