Orthodox monetary theory tells us that central banks matter, a lot. Monetary policy is supposed to be the difference in everything from economy to currency. If one central is doing one thing and another central bank something different, it is presumed the only necessary information to infer what markets and therefore economies might do in response. The Federal Reserve is [...]
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 [...]
There is no change to the risk budget this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between risk assets and bonds is unchanged at 50/50. There are no changes to the portfolio this month. The growth and inflation outlook continued to weaken somewhat since last month's update. Certainly nothing very dramatic though, just a general, gentle trend of weaker [...]
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 [...]
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