For the magic trick to work, it has to be credible. The audience has to be given something concrete upon which they will suspend their disbelief. Quantitative Easing was just such a trick, though only the public held onto any basis for success. You still hear it all the time, how QE was “money printing.” That was the trick. It [...]
If there is one small silver lining from 2018’s economic performance, it is that Milton Friedman’s interest rate fallacy is being robustly proven yet again. Many Economists will have you believe that low interest rates, short or long, are stimulus. This is a huge mistake. Here’s what Friedman said in December 1997: As the economy revives, however, interest rates would [...]
Central bankers will often tell you exactly what you want to know, at least when it comes to their intentions. You can first begin by reading Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s 1963 monetary bible A Monetary History. It’s all in there. From it, central banks all over the world have devised technical schemes intended to hold fast to the old [...]
To be an interested observer of things in the summer of 2013 was to be awash in the awareness of so many contradictions packed into one little piece of history. Forward guidance, for one, recognized the effects of markets. If QE was really effective, interest rates would rise not fall in anticipation of those positive effects. This was, actually, the [...]
Today was supposed to see the release of the Census Bureau’s retail trade report, a key data set pertaining to the (alarming) state of American consumers, therefore workers by extension (income). With the federal government in partial shutdown, those numbers will be delayed until further notice. In their place we will have to manage with something like the Federal Reserves’ [...]
We are starting to get a better sense of what happened to turn everything so drastically in December. Not that we hadn’t suspected while it was all taking place, but more and more in January the economic data for the last couple months of 2018 backs up the market action. These were no speculators looking to break Jay Powell, probing [...]
And like that, it’s all different. For more than a year, two years, really, we’ve heard constantly about wage pressures. The US economy buoyed by several domestic factors as well as globally synchronized growth was in danger of getting too far out of hand. The unemployment rate said it was time – three years ago in 2015. The lower the [...]
After a horrible December and a rough start to the year, as if manna from Heaven the clouds parted and everything seemed good again. Not 2019 this was early February 2015. If there was a birth date for Janet Yellen’s “transitory” canard it surely came within this window. It didn’t matter that currencies had crashed and oil, too, or that [...]
On Friday, February, 2, 2001, the BLS reported stellar headline numbers for its Employment Situation release. Preliminary estimates for the Establishment Survey suggested US payrolls had gained +268k in the month of January. To put it in perspective, that would equate to +324k in today’s population, or a bit better than the latest figure. The economic climate of the time [...]
Clothed in immense self-denial, hung up on absurd self-confidence, Federal Reserve officials gathered on August 7, 2007, to discuss how things really weren’t as bad as everyone seemed to think. There were several key conversations taking place at the FOMC meeting held then all leading nowhere. Policymakers would literally laugh off obvious distress in crucial markets. Here’s one example: MR. [...]
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