The sweeping tide of populist election victories has not been limited to just the US and Europe. There have been torrents in Asia, too. Though there is some disagreement whether he counts among them or not, India’s Narendra Modi swept to a historic electoral triumph in May 2014 sure sounding a lot like one, maybe even one of the first. [...]
Early last month, Deutsche Bank replaced one CEO pledged to paring back the bank’s ailing franchise with another committed to doing the same thing only more quickly. As I wrote at the time, “Cryan isn’t being ousted because he was wrong, but because he was right.” In comes Christian Sewing whose plans are starting to come into focus. It’s not [...]
There’s one final step to our examination of QE and bank reserves (you’ll need to read through at least Part 1, though Part 2 is worth the time, too). It’s all well and good to try and map out complex subjects using very simple models. That can help illuminate concepts, but we should always strive for validation. The heart of the [...]
Since we’ve already cracked open the accounting, it makes some sense to take our example into an important corollary examination (if you haven’t yet, you’ll need to read through Part 1). In our prior examples, we’ve assumed that the swap of risk-free assets on Bank A’s asset side is a neutral trade. That is, there aren’t any costs or downside [...]
I completely understand the confusion regarding bank reserves. I really do. It’s easy to believe they are money because that’s what you’ve been taught from Day 1. Not only that, the same message is carelessly reinforced in the media every single time QE or any LSAP is referenced. Bank reserves are the aftermath of money printing, therefore = money. That [...]
Like so many financial prices, copper’s is tied to both money and economic fundamentals. They call it Dr. Copper for a reason, good as it has been in suggesting ahead of time the direction for the global economy. China is as central for the setting there as well as in “dollars.” During the early days of the “rising dollar” I [...]
The world is full of anomalies. It may seem like a paradox, but financial markets are particularly eventful places. Something happens, some people notice, and most often it goes…nowhere. It’s all the time and a constant part of analysis, trying to identify and separate what is truly contained. The global eurodollar monetary system grew so far and so fast in [...]
On July 15, 2008, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sat in front of Congress for the second of his required Humphrey-Hawkins reports for that year. The original act meant for these to be more than bland economic obfuscation, where the original Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 demanded monetary targets. The Fed stopped being able to produce them [...]
It’s impossible to tell what drives the short run in anything, so anything we describe and attempt to ascribe moves to comes with a grain of salt. That said, there are clearly some things missing here. I’m not talking about big stuff like overrating the Fed’s predictive abilities and its resolve, ridiculous stock valuations, or anything of the like. Stocks [...]
What determines the price of gold? It seems like it should be an easy question to answer, but gold more than perhaps any other asset often mystifies in its behavior. Part of the reason is mainstream, orthodox Economics and its practitioners who have waged an intentional war on the metal for more than a century and a half. Demonizing it [...]
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