Given the historic data for US retail sales, “somehow” the bond market ignored them yesterday (and today). Yields globally fell for the most part, with real yields (TIPS) really discounting the significance of consumers in March. Bonds aren’t buying that this is anything other than temporary.Not surprisingly, the mainstream media refuses not to buy what bonds aren’t. I mean, for [...]
They were never very specific to begin with, even in Ben Bernanke’s infamous November 2010 Post op-ed covering the start of QE2. Officials like to keep it purposefully vague as a kind of dry powder, a margin for error. If bureaucrats become too specific, the public would reasonably hold them to their own standard being laid out. The point behind [...]
There is a lot of evidence which shows some basis for expectations-based monetary policy. Much of what becomes a recession or worse is due to the psychological impacts upon businesses (who invest and hire) as well as workers being consumers (who earn and then spend). Once the snowball of macro contraction begins rolling downhill, rational prudence dictates some degree of [...]
ADP reports today that, for the fifth consecutive month, the labor market recovery everyone had hoped for has instead been transformed into something else entirely. According to the firm, private payrolls expanded by just 307,000 in November 2020 from October. That’s the slowest pace since July, and, most important of all, leaves the private US economy near 10 million short [...]
Mario Draghi’s sunset retirement festivities weren’t supposed to have gone off this way. Celebrated for his July 2012 “promise” to save the euro, he instead spent the entirety of his eight years as President of the ECB chasing inflation and recovery, the very things meant to accomplish the euro’s saving, without success. By the end, his final act in September [...]
It’s easy to pick on Bill Gross because he made it so easy for everyone to do so. Time and again, he called for an end to the bond market “bull”, seeking to make huge profits on the fixed income massacre he said would soon follow whichever one of those decrees. There were several and they weren’t limited to just [...]
“At least we aren’t Europe” wasn’t quite the standard for excellence Ben Bernanke was originally shooting for. Certainly not when he began QE in the United States, nor at the inauguration of its repeat not even two years later. The former Fed Chairman had promised recovery and delivered instead a highly disputed number of “jobs saved.”Framing it this way, the [...]
Their experience with COVID has been different in each case. Their response to the outbreak and pandemic hardly uniform. Mexico, for example, has reported 855,000 cases of the coronavirus from which more than 86,000 have died (or were found to have the disease when they died). Japan, on the other hand, just 93,000 cases with only 1,600 fatalities. We all [...]
Because it worked out so well for Jay Powell? No. They have no idea what to do now. Zero. And they are out of ideas. I’m writing about the ECB here, but it begins first with the Federal Reserve Flustered by years of a very low unemployment rate stuck several points below where “full employment” had been estimated as late [...]
As the calendar turned to September, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidelines expanding and extending existing moratoriums previously put in place to stop evictions during the pandemic. Families affected by COVID either through the disease or as a result of job loss due to the coronavirus have been protected from landowner actions including eviction [...]
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