As with other prices, if we are interested in what’s going on with dollar exchange values (not be confused with eurodollars, the shadow conditions behind everything) we have to start with the futures market. Unlike UST’s or WTI, the one standing for the dollar index, or DXY in this case, isn’t particularly massive. That may be an unfair comparison given [...]
On November 29, 2009, the government of Dubai shocked the world with a statement acknowledging trouble with its debt load. Dubai World, a government-owned conglomerate that was the conduit for the country’s oil-fueled debt extravaganza that had literally transformed the nation, asked for a “stand still” from creditors in order to extend maturities until May 30, 2010. It came while [...]
For quite a long time I obsessed over November 20, 2013. It was a day that for the vast majority of humanity was like any other, nothing too far out of normal and certainly nothing that would seem to mark it for remembrance. But in my realm of yield curves and interest rate swaps, the things that tell us a [...]
I suppose it’s easy to look at gold and see only fear. It is, after all, the ultimate currency hedge. Therefore, if the price is rising there is probably a good chance fear over monetary considerations is, too. The opposite interpretation, then, would appear to be just as straightforward, but it’s often complicated by the mechanics of wholesale global eurodollar [...]
One of Candidate Trump’s biggest priorities was to renegotiate NAFTA. Seen as an accelerator for harm not just inside of the nation’s rust belt, the incoming administration made it a top priority. Blaming the trade deal for the loss of 700k manufacturing jobs, Robert Lighthizer, the US’s top trade official for the renegotiation process, said in August as talks got [...]
In January 2016, just as the wave of “global turmoil” was cresting on domestic as well as foreign shores, retired Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was giving a series of lectures for the IMF. His topic wasn’t really the so-called taper tantrum of 2013 but it really was. Even ideologically blinded economists like Bernanke could see how one might have [...]
In Ian Fleming’s 1959 spy novel Goldfinger, he makes mention of the Moscow Rules. These were rules-of-thumb for clandestine agents working during the Cold War in the Soviet capital, a notoriously difficult assignment. Among the quips included in the catalog were, “everyone is potentially under opposition control” and “do not harass the opposition.” Fleming’s book added another, “Once is an [...]
When the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913, there was no role for it in the marketing and selling of government debt. This wasn’t an oversight on the part of Congress. For more than two years before the Fed, the Treasury Department hadn’t issued any marketable instruments at all. In those days it just didn’t seem a necessary function. World [...]
The economy was sailing along into its Hollywood sunset in 2014 before it was rudely interrupted by the “rising dollar.” At first, the mainstream narrative was that a higher dollar exchange was a good thing, an indication that global markets were embracing the economic revival; or, if you didn’t quite want to get that optimistic, it at least signaled the [...]
When the People’s Republic of China (PROC) was granted full UN status in 1971, everything was then set in motion. The successor to Chaing Kai-shek’s nationalist government in the Republic of China (ROC, or what we call today Taiwan) was originally granted as a founding member and one of five Security Council seats. UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 instead recognized [...]
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