Tag Archives: Central Banks

Submitted by Danielle DiMartino Booth via DiMartinoBooth.com, “Kings have long arms, many ears, and many eyes.” So read an English proverb dated back to the year of our Lord 1539. And thus was born an idiom that today translates to the very familiar Long Arm of the Law. It stands to reason that such a warning was born of feudal times when omnipotent and seemingly omnipresent monarchs personified the law, possessed...

What happens on the 18th floor of the main tower at Centralbahnplatz 2 in Basel, stays on the 18th floor of the main tower at Centralbahnplatz 2. That’s because this is where every other month the world’s central bankers meet in complete secrecy – no minutes are ever kept – to discuss the global economy completely unfettered of any concerns of accountability, and decide on what monetary policies they will implement to...

Summary: Debt is just the flip side of credit. As debt goes bad, credit disappears. And then the system that created so much credit-money will go into reverse, destroying the nation’s money supply. The money supply (actually, the supply of ready credit) will shrink – suddenly and dramatically. And what should have been a minor, routine pullback in the economy will become a catastrophic panic. Bezzle BALTIMORE – ...

It was just a thought…. Cartoon by Bob Rich Loose Monetary Policy Remains in Place Last week, we asked where then will silver go. Well, the price moved around this week, dipping on Thursday but then rebounding sharply on Friday. It closed up 13 cents from last week. The price of gold rose $24. This week, the Federal Reserve announced that it will not hike rates. Most economists (and traders) have long been expecting a...

Summary More than $10 trillion of government bonds now trade at negative yields. And another $10 trillion or so worth of U.S. stocks trade well above their long-term average valuations. And there’s more than $200 trillion of debt in the world. All of this sits on the Fed’s financial applecart. Does Janet Yellen dare upset it? Blame “Brexit” BALTIMORE – The U.S. stock market broke its losing streak on Thursday [and...

Summary On Wednesday, Janet Yellen pressed on the broken buttons again.  After the two day FOMC meeting, the Fed Chair announced they’d continue pressing the federal funds rate down to just a ¼ to ½ percent – effectively zero.  What type of insanity is this? If she keeps it up, and whole thing doesn’t implode, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note could also slip below zero…along with the hopes and dreams of three...

We have seen several explanations for the financial crisis and its lingering effects depressing our global economy in its aftermath. Some are plain stupid, such as greed for some reason suddenly overwhelmed people working within finance, as if people in finance were not greedy before 2007. Others try to explain it through “liberalisation” which is almost just as nonsensical as government regulators never liberalised...

First The Telegraph, then The Sun, and today The Spectator all came out on the “Leave” side of the Brexit debate. However, perhaps even more shocking to the establishment is the CIO of a major bank’s asset management arm dismissing the apparent carnage that Cameron, Obama, and Osborne have declared imminent, warning that, “many articles on the Brexit vote overstate its risks and consequences.” As JPM’s Michael...

As Brexit appears to gathering pace among British voters, Bloomberg Briefs interviews Hung Tan, executive managing director at the Institute of International Finance in Washington, DC., to understand the global impact of a decision by Britain to leave The EU…    Q: What would happen if Britain voted to leave the EU?  A: It is not Lehman in the short term in terms of markets being in a panic or chaotic mood, because the...

Within the world of central bank and government gold reserves, there is often an assumption that these gold holdings consist entirely of gold bullion bars. While this is true in some cases, it is not the fully story because many central banks and governments, such as the US, France, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and Venezuela, all hold an element of gold bullion coins as part of their official monetary gold reserves. These...