On Friday I wrote: Again, the size of your reserves reflects, and is proportional to, your potential need for funding. You can’t accumulate that many unless you have a similarly arrayed “dollar short.” The bigger the stockpile the more potential for it to get out of hand if things go the wrong way (usually on the self-reinforcing cycle of rising [...]
In June 2008, ICAP actually launched a US-based alternative to LIBOR. It ended up as nothing more than one very minor footnote lost in a sea of more pressing problems and events. Still, that they even tried is somewhat significant and relevant to today. Before the whole cheating scandal came out, there were questions surrounding just what LIBOR was indicating. [...]
The only way to change the meaning of a word like “transitory” is to put together a constant string of temporary factors that when taken individually keep with the traditional definition but in combination completely obliterate it. Something happens to knock inflation off track, and then just as soon as that one thing is about to abate and inflation is [...]
Why are bond yields falling again? There are, as always, a few reasons mostly related to perceived risks (with liquidity always right at the top, at least since August 2007). Those were more easily set aside, or at least more gently reconsidered, when inflation hysteria raged across the internet. But after talking about it for months, at some point it [...]
The biggest risk to the bond bear case, that expressed by Bill Gross, Jeffrey Gundlach, and Ray Dalio, is, ironically, stocks. Convention has it that rising interest rates are bad for them, but what are falling stock prices for UST’s? Historically speaking, the introduction of risk and even liquidations is bond positive. When the last jobs report came out, Bill [...]
Friday, January 26, stocks hit their last record highs. Buoyed by supposedly strong earnings along with near euphoria about tax reform anecdotes, all three major US indices were sitting at their respective tops after another big week. Everything was apparently going in the right direction: All the three key U.S. indexes closed at record levels on Friday following better-than-expected earnings [...]
On July 15, 2008, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sat in front of Congress for the second of his required Humphrey-Hawkins reports for that year. The original act meant for these to be more than bland economic obfuscation, where the original Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 demanded monetary targets. The Fed stopped being able to produce them [...]
For the end-of-bond-bull-market-crowd, 3% is a line in the sand. There is no inherent significance in that number, except that it’s a round one. The benchmark 10s as of now trade with regard to that level as if it’s a ceiling. That’s what makes it so momentous. In 2013, the yield finally broke 3% the day after Christmas, getting as [...]
Ten years ago today, one of Carlyle Group’s mortgage funds, Carlyle Capital Corp (CCC), was seized by creditors. Precipitated by dwindling liquidity, the fund’s effective insolvency would amplify those global “dollar” pressures and lead to Bear Stearns’ untimely demise mere days later. The fund’s corporate parent issued a statement on March 6, 2008, that read: The last few days have [...]
Imagine you live in a terrific neighborhood backed right up to a large wilderness. This heavily forested area has inside of it grown up a tremendous amount of underbrush. The local government, concerned for your property as well as those of your neighbors, starts making noises about taking care of the land before it dries out and a wildfire starts [...]
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