There is another part to the upcoming July debt ceiling constraint. On the one hand, as noted last week, the Department of Treasury will have to draw down its checking account balance it holds at the Federal Reserve (TGA). There are, as there have always been, consequences for doing so insofar as bank reserves are concerned. These are extrapolated into [...]
If you remember back to September 2019’s repo rumble, in its immediate aftermath - as well as for some time thereafter - a common explanation put forward for the disruption had been related to a sudden increase in tax liabilities. It was said that an unusually high level of especially corporate receipts had left the Treasury flush with extra cash. [...]
I think because the big, public failures of GFC1 haven’t repeated the public has been given a false sense of stability. While the idea of subprime mortgages being responsible for all that went on during 2008 has remained generally accepted, there was for a time an awakened recognition that big financial firms were doing complicated things in the monetary shadows [...]
There are those people who will remain convinced forever forward that the Federal Reserve is run by evil geniuses absolutely intent upon robbing the free peoples of the United States of their financial freedom. As evidence, they point to one unsuccessful, controversial monetary policy after another, none of them effective at accomplishing their main task of putting the economic and [...]
Lehman Brothers was a cultural marker, the kind of thing that sticks for generations because of all the wrong reasons. Hardly anyone had heard of the investment bank throughout its unbelievably long history stretching back to the middle of the 1840’s (yes, eighteen forties). But being near the center of a multi-generational breakdown causing as yet-untold damage and misery extending [...]
Are foreigners selling Treasury bills? If they are, this would seem to merit consideration for the reflation argument. After all, the paramount monetary deficiency exposed by March’s GFC2 (and the Fed’s blatant role in making it worse) was the dangerous degree of shortage over the best collateral. Best collateral means OTR, and for standard practice this had always meant Treasury [...]
Twenty years ago, in November 2000, the Treasury Department changed one aspect of the way the government would sell its own debt. Auctions of these and other kinds of securities had been ongoing for decades, back to the twenties, and they had been transformed many times along the way. In the middle of the 1970’s Great Inflation, for example, Treasury [...]
It wasn’t the first time the ground had already been eroding underneath his feet. Randall Quarles took at turn at the Treasury Department during the Bush Administration, rising to Undersecretary for Domestic Finance during the most maniacal part of the eurodollar-fueled housing bubble. Not surprisingly, among the last things he did there was tell the public how great everything was [...]
The dominating feature during the last months and days of globally synchronized growth (Reflation #3, to you and me) wasn’t inflation nor growth. It was instead CNY. Taken at face value, the marvelous resurrection of China’s currency after 2014-16’s debacle (Euro$ #3, to you and me) did seem consistent with a global dollar system (eurodollar, to you and me) rebound.And [...]
Before the word “taper” ever left the lips of anyone occupying an official position at the Federal Reserve in the late spring of 2013, there was already something very much amiss. Not that you would have known it, of course. In the financial media, everything was moving along swimmingly, Bernanke the thrice-crowned hero. QE4 had been dutifully buried by its [...]
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