There are those people who will remain convinced forever forward that the Federal Reserve is run by evil geniuses absolutely intent upon robbing the free peoples of the United States of their financial freedom. As evidence, they point to one unsuccessful, controversial monetary policy after another, none of them effective at accomplishing their main task of putting the economic and [...]
Since we highlighted the action in T-bills yesterday and the day before, it’s worth at least mentioning what TIC had to say about the instruments. Foreigners had been reducing their holdings of them not out of growing distaste but rather the opposite. There’s not nearly as many of them, not enough for what’s demanded, the Treasury Department quite purposefully (and [...]
Before getting into the why of the dollar’s stubbornly high exchange value in the face of so much “money printing”, we need to first go back and undertake a decent enough review of the guts maybe even the central focus of the global (euro)dollar system. I’ve written before that the repo market is the lender of last resort, not central [...]
It was chaos. Rumors of not one but two large European banks being pushed to the brink. Money market funds worried about breaking the buck rapidly pulling cash out from under any global name. The FOMC debating what would’ve been a repo-like bailout, even though $1.6 trillion of bank reserves had been “added” to the system. What was most damaging [...]
On March 2, the Bank of Japan leapt into the stock market, Haruhiko Kuroda burnishing his Superman cape as he flew in to rescue the Nikkei. Purchasing a record amount of ETF’s that day, shares in Tokyo surged. It was a clear message, or so everyone thought. Don’t fight the Fed nor the Bank of Japan, not when they can [...]
When the FOMC published the minutes for its November policy meeting, they included an unusually lengthy discussion about federal funds (effective) and IOER. I have no doubt that policymakers would rather have skipped the topic altogether. Demonstrating how little they actually control matters, the plight of EFF has forced them into an almost detailed digression. One thing they wrote with [...]
It’s worth revisiting the topic of the “rising dollar.” What determines its exchange value in the first place? Orthodox convention associates the general direction up or down with interest rate differentials, the infamous global carry trade. Not just any interest rate comps, either, but those of short-term money markets. Thus, if the Federal Reserve is “raising rates” as it has [...]
It’s impossible to tell what drives the short run in anything, so anything we describe and attempt to ascribe moves to comes with a grain of salt. That said, there are clearly some things missing here. I’m not talking about big stuff like overrating the Fed’s predictive abilities and its resolve, ridiculous stock valuations, or anything of the like. Stocks [...]
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 [...]
Brexit, Trump’s election, even the Bank of Japan rumored to be thinking helicopter. Last year was the year of thinking differently and therein was hope. No matter how many times some markets and especially media blindly accepted the “stimulus” or “recovery” judgments of economists over the years, by 2016 and the near-recession globally that accompanied a “rising dollar” that nobody [...]
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