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 [...]
Despite the name, the Fed doesn’t actually intervene in the US$ repo market. I know they called them overnight repo operations, but that’s only because they mimic repo transactions not because the central bank is conducting them in that specific place. What really happened was FRBNY allotting bank reserves (in exchange for UST, MBS, and agency collateral) only to the [...]
When all this federal funds business started, the effective federal funds (EFF) rate was pretty well established at 16 bps above the RRP “floor.” It had been that way, consistently, all throughout Reflation #3, all throughout 2017. So consistent, that dependable spread was a very solid indication of reflation. As of yesterday, EFF was…16 bps above RRP. It’s not at [...]
It is the shadows what really matter. A big enough problem in them would affect pretty much everything, including far off, out-of-the-way places like federal funds. Thus, if we observe weird things going on there we can infer more serious issues back where it does mean something. In 2013 and 2014, the Federal Reserve was hugely optimistic. FOMC officials didn’t [...]
On June 13, the day the eurodollar futures curve inverted, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was at his regularly scheduled press conference following the regularly scheduled FOMC meeting. Nobody asked him about eurodollar futures, of course, because why bring that up? The press did inquire about IOER, though. The Fed had decided to make a “technical adjustment” in its policy [...]
You have to go back four years for some honesty. The FOMC in January 2014 could be more forthright simply because the committee’s members believed they wouldn’t ever have to explain themselves. They voted to taper QE at the end of 2013 with the expectation that the economy would perform as their econometric models laid out. Thus, they could say: [...]
The Fed voted for the first federal funds increase in almost a decade on December 15, 2015. It was the official end of ZIRP, and though taking so many additional years to happen, to many it marked the start of recovery. The yield on the 2-year Treasury Note was 98 bps that day. A lot has happened between now and [...]
Returning to the theme of the parallel evolutionary developments in the early 20th century as compared to the last decades of it, in 1908 famed Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Carnegie wrote what seems today a misplaced article for New York Outlook magazine. The steel magnate lamented the state of American banking, which he called within his piece “at least one [...]
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