Given the dramatic inflection in “dollar” behavior surrounding the March 18 FOMC meeting there wasn’t much surprising in the latest TIC figures for that month. If anything was complicated it was due solely to the fact that this change occurred mid-month. For the most part, the heavy “tightening” trend that began anew after January was reset by the end of [...]
I think it is interesting that the TIC data also provides some further confirmation about the Swiss participation in the January 15 version of the “dollar” problem. Of course, that still fits with the supercycle decay of the overall eurodollar standard, and even as one of those asymmetries, but I think it deserves its own emphasis. Again, all caveats about [...]
When categorizing intuition about the real economy, it is often regarded as a combination of both structural and now cyclical problems. There was, as yet, no true recovery owing largely to factors that continue to linger beyond historical comparisons about what “should” have occurred in and after the Great Recession. Some economists refer to deleveraging especially of households as that [...]
Under the traditional formula for viewing currency movements, a rising currency is believed to be a huge impediment for economic expansion as exports “become relatively more expensive” against trading partners and competitors. This is a two-dimensional view in three-dimensional space as it leaves out the very necessities of finance. It isn’t just straightforward that one causes the other, as the [...]
With the latest release of the Treasury Department’s TIC statistics there is a lot about December now that makes sense. Much of what is contained within the figures matches the theories I put forward contemporarily, including the severity of the “dollar” problem that month (leading to any number of downstream effects, including seriously heightened bearishness in US credit markets) and [...]
The major categories provided within the TIC estimates are a breakdown between private “flows” and those from official sources, such as foreign government and central bank accounts (as much as is known). In terms of those larger segments, there wasn’t really much of note in the update for November. There is some indication that foreign central banks might have become [...]
With the latest TIC data in hand it looks more and more like “dollar” problems started in the interior and spread outward. What I mean by that is eurodollar banks were the first to see or cause disruption which radiated outward into other currencies and credit systems. That would seem to confirm (for me, anyway) the ECB’s role in kicking [...]
One last of piece of evidence tying QE to liquidity disruptions in 2014, and the big buying “crash” of October 15, is the “flow” of “dollars” presented by TIC. My contention from last week was that the decay in systemic liquidity (repo) began not in May 2013 with the introduction of the “taper” concept, but a few months earlier when [...]
As much as overseas markets, particularly emerging, have come roaring back in a lot of places, there is still palpable unease in dollar allocations. That is as much expected as any kind of erosion or dysfunction will take a meandering course of ebbs and flows. But I am a little surprised at how easy the concerns of last year have [...]
The global dollar situation continues to get muddied by divergent and apparently unrelated factors of significant scale. The Chinese are still not buying UST with nearly the same vigor that was very evident prior to the dollar travails last year (which I still believe is dollar liquidity rather than PBOC intent), while Japan and Belgium have suddenly found themselves infatuated [...]
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