According to the headline TIC statistics, foreign central banks have in the past six months sold the fewest UST’s since the 6-month period ended November 2015. That may indicate an easing of “dollar” pressure in the private markets due to “reflation” sentiment. They are, however, still selling. In February 2017, the latest month available, the foreign official sector disposed of [...]
It is simply the nature of modern Economics to get most things backward. Positive Economics particularly in the form of econometrics has been like a declaration of ignorance, where Economists have formally decided to try and understand as little as possible. If you know anything about statistics you know why, for the one thing that bogs down statistical equations and [...]
When the Treasury Department released its Treasury International Capital (TIC) data for December, what was a somewhat obscure report suddenly found mainstream attention. Private foreign investors had sold tens of billions in US securities primarily US Treasury bonds and notes which the media then made into some kind of warning to then-incoming President Trump. It was supposed to be a [...]
It is understandable why everyone is right now fixated on Washington. The repeal, or not, of Obamacare is, to paraphrase former Vice President Biden, a big deal. In terms of market expectations, it is difficult to discern by how much. That was to be, after all, but one step of several reductions to the administrative burden on the economy. Maybe [...]
It may just be that in life you have to get used to disappointment. Though not for lack of trying, I have spent a great deal of time over the years intending to piece together exactly what happened on days like October 15, 2014. The official explanation is an obvious whitewash, one so haphazard that I doubt it will ever [...]
If there has been a lot different about the past few months, it was reflected in the TIC figures and then some. What is usually pretty easy to decipher, there were instead all sorts of shifts across the most important categories. For one, the foreign official sector was busy in December buying up UST’s and dollar assets just as the [...]
The whole point of any “stimulus” is to buy time. The idea is to keep the economy busy or, in the case of more purely monetary policy, happy during that time so that the economy on the demand side can on its own heal. In the parlance of orthodox economics, “stimulus” reduces the output gap, the difference between current output [...]
With JPY pushing above its recent resistance (for whatever might have caused it), it is useful to determine if that is an idiosyncratic change or whether there are other “dollar” indications that support a possible breakout. This is especially true given what I think is causing the move in JPY, namely that “reflation” had been initially predicated on ideas of [...]
As noted earlier, the Bank of Japan has a whole host of problems over its QQE with YCC attachments. Japan’s central bank has belatedly discovered Finance 101, where being one-dimensional doesn’t actually help the cause of “stimulus.” For far too long official policy has been lower, lower, and lower, whether that was carried out in JGB yields or whether it [...]
The Bank of Japan had announced another acronym with which to add to QQE, a term that already includes an extra “Q”, on September 21, 2016. It was a bizarre engagement, like something out of a TV advertisement for laundry detergent or diet supplements where the central bank marketed the same QQE that you always knew and loved but now [...]
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