There was a lot to talk about at the last FOMC meeting, where most are focused on “patience” and all that about rate hikes. Less discussed and analyzed, as these areas are often difficult to parse for outsiders, was the fact that the savior of rate “normalization” has been totally and completely put out to pasture. The reverse repo program [...]
Commentary has not been able to ignore changes in the Fed’s balance sheet mechanics with all the potential systemic shifts occurring as QE ends and the FOMC contemplates going even further. As I said last week, the total balance of bank “reserves” declined but not due to anything other than an operational test of the Fed’s Term Deposit Facility (TDF). [...]
As the Eurozone absorbs yet another economic blow, the urge to engage in even more historic debasement via the ECB has heightened, to say the least. The talk about a European “QE” is near endless, as that is about all that is left for them to do. That is itself a powerful statement, lost upon those that are calling for [...]
There were already operational problems in September when the Fed capped the limit on its reverse repo program, so in retrospect it isn’t all that surprising that it is being downplayed now. As the FOMC supposedly moves toward a rate increase, it is confronted with a very real problem in that the federal funds rate, the interest rate that has [...]
Almost two weeks after the event, there is still more than a little nervousness about what took place on October 15 in UST trading – and for very good reason. Up to that point, proclamations about systemic liquidity degradations were just theoretical to most people. The reason was, and continues to be, that nobody seems to care about disruptions in [...]
When speaking about the costs of having undertaken numerous QE’s in the US, there is not only the economic inefficiency and asset price psychology to account in the tapering and ultimately exit (hopefully a permanent one this time, though I increasingly doubt it). There is little doubt that repo market problems, that have become far too persistent to be comfortable, [...]
“We don’t exactly know how it will work” should be stamped upon every message coming from the policymaking apparatus from this point forward, and then retroactively applied to every message in the age of risk and rate repression. Action in short-term money markets has heated up yet again, and that is not a positive statement toward vital function. To “exit” [...]
With the latest data from FRBNY in hand, the surge in repo fails authorities and certain credit market observers that were stressed over the affair, it is actually confirmation of regularity, and thus a high degree of systemic deficiency. Further, as a real world test, it ends any credibility the reverse repo program had as an institutional tool for maintaining [...]
One more post on the FOMC statement as I think it is vitally important in the context of financial function. I already covered the economic end of it, which is comparatively undesirable itself, but the only mention of repo in the statement was in reference to the assumed high degree of effectiveness of the reverse repo/IOER “floor” the Fed has [...]
Despite now two doses of QE taper and much more confirmation that the FOMC will be committed to that course, gold prices have not collapsed. Conventional wisdom has been uniform in believing QE as inflationary, and thus a positive for gold prices (despite the trajectory since 2011). Removal of QE should have been, if this thinking is correct, a negative [...]
Stay In Touch