When the 4-week Treasury bill equivalent yield traversed the so-called RRP “floor” back in 2017, hardly anyone noticed. With rates nominally rising due to the Federal Reserve’s historically dovish hawkish normalization push, it was all a jumbled mess. What if the 4-week bill rate (or 3-month) was somewhat less than this RRP thing-y, they were all moving anyway.Even as the [...]
Oh, the irony. Recall Janet Yellen’s plight, circa early 2015. Oil prices were “unexpectedly” crashing raining on her recovery-like parade. The Federal Reserve, Yellen as its Chairman, was about to embark on an ambitious program of regular every-meeting rate hikes to head off, its models assumed, the coming inflationary bump which was to confirm full if belated monetary policy success. [...]
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 [...]
The Federal Reserve conducts reverse repo operations (RRP) daily, and has for more than half a decade. These are very different from the “liquidity” operations the central bank has been deploying since last year’s rumble in the repo market; the latter merely mimic a repo transaction and are intended to push bank reserves the Fed creates on the spot out [...]
I thought this one needed a separate notation, though the same subject as the previous article. We’re still talking about the foreign repo pool, or monetary policy’s original reverse repo. It’s basically a way for overseas official governments and central banks to tell the Fed’s New York branch they’re uncomfortable with the dollar condition. How US central bankers interpret that [...]
Not a good day to be a global central bank. Competitive devaluations all around? Kidding aside, it’s getting serious in China. CNY DOWN = BAD, so says Big Mama. "The kind of dollar selling from that bank was so aggressive that we knew instantly that it must be from the Big Mama," said a Shanghai-based senior currency trader at an [...]
When the Chinese yuan suddenly plummeted in mid-August 2015, the world looked on in stunned confusion. It didn’t make sense. The global economy was about to take off, they thought, and it wouldn’t be doing that without China’s vast anticipated contributions. Such a large move in such a short time frame for a major currency was another big “unexpected.” To [...]
Chinese bank reserves contracted in April 2018 for the first time in almost two years. The decline was small, just 0.2%, but it is still represents a significant deviation from the limited growth since the turmoil in 2015 and early 2016. The decline in reserves further corroborates our theory of events. To briefly review, China has a currency problem first [...]
A few weeks ago, the PBOC stunned many mainstream observers by reducing the RRR. It cut against the preferred narrative that the central bank was “tightening” in anticipation of an economic and therefore inflationary breakout (labor shortages, don’t you know). It didn’t seem to make sense. From the perspective of globally synchronized growth, it wouldn’t. Coming at it instead from [...]
Throughout much of last year, we were told repeatedly that the PBOC was tightening monetary policy. China’s central bank had raised its reverse repo rate twice early on, and then once more last December (and would do so again just last month). These moves coincided with Federal Reserve “rate hikes”, seemingly in line with the whole idea. Not only that, [...]
Stay In Touch