Tag Archives: bonds

The Federal Reserve, like other central banks around the world, it does lend out the securities it owns and holds. Sophisticated modern wholesale money markets are highly collateralized, so much so that collateral itself takes on the properties of currency. Elasticity of collateral is as much – if not more – important as elasticity of other forms of wholesale money (therefore excluding bank reserves). Dealers, however, they don’t much like using the Fed’s Securities...

The dollar was high and going higher. Emerging markets had been seriously complaining. In one, the top central banker for India outright warned, “dollar funding has evaporated.” The TIC data supported his view, with full-blown negative months, net selling from afar that’s historically akin to what was coming out of India and the rest of the world. China was cutting its RRR multiple times. This was all following May 29, 2018, too, a day in the global “bond market”...

When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money. The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it was again his topic in California early Autumn ’97. As Emil Kalinowski and I had...

Since the Federal Reserve is not in the money business, their recent hawkish shift toward an increasingly anti-inflationary stance is a twisted and convoluted case of subjective interpretation. Inflation is money and if the Fed was a central bank the issue of consumer prices wouldn’t necessarily be simple, it would, however, be much simpler: is there or isn’t there too much money flowing through the economy. News to the vast majority of the public, no one at any...

Chinese run media, the Global Times, blatantly tweeted an homage to China’s late leader Mao Zedong commemorating his 128th birthday. Fully understanding the storm of controversy this would create, with the Communist government’s full approval, such a provocation has been taken in the West as if just one more chess piece played in its geopolitical game against the United States in particular. No. The Communists really mean it. Mao’s their guy again. No. Let’s recall...

We’re only ever given the two options: the economy is either in recession, or it isn’t. And if “not”, then we’re led to believe it must be in recovery if not outright booming already. These are what Economics says is the business cycle. A full absence of unit roots. No gray areas to explore the sudden arrival of only deeply unsatisfactory “booms.” Every once in a while, however, even the mainstream media meanders closer to the actual economics (small “e”) of the...

If there is a better, more fitting way to head into the Christmas holiday in the United States than by digging into the finances and monetary flows of the People’s Bank of China, then I just don’t want to know what it is. Contrary to maybe anyone’s rational first impression that this is somehow insane, there’s much we can tell about the state of the world, the whole world and its “dollars”, right from this one key data source. And the timing is equally as festive;...

With the eurodollar futures curve slightly inverted, the implications of it are somewhat specific to the features of that particular market. And there’s more than enough reason to reasonably suspect this development is more specifically deflationary money than more general economic concerns. What I mean is, those latter have come later (“growth scare”) only long after the world’s real money truly began to dry up. Money then economy. How do we know? For one, sequence...

Seems like ancient history given all that’s happened since, but on October 13 Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced a planned deluge of cash management bills in the wake of the debt ceiling resolution (the first one). The next day, China’s currency, CNY, broke free from its previous and suspiciously narrow range. Speculating a connection a few days thereafter, I wrote: …it had been on the 13th when Treasury announced its intention to unleash a CMB (cash...

Have oil producers shot themselves in the foot, while at the same time stabbing the global economy in the back? It’d be quite a feat if it turns out to be the case, one of those historical oddities that when anyone might honestly look back on it from the future still hung in disbelief. Let’s start by reviewing just the facts. First up, yesterday the Federal Reserve published the November 2021 estimates for Industrial Production in the United States. As has been the...