Tag Archives: interest rate swaps

This isn’t about COVID. It’s been building since the end of August, a shift in mood, perception, and reality that began turning things several months before even then. With markets fickle yet again, a lot today, what’s going on here? What you’ll hear or have already heard is something about Europe and more lockdowns, fears about a second wave of the pandemic. No, that doesn’t fit the herdlike change in direction you can observe across many different markets (below)....

There are three things the markets have going for them right now, and none of them have anything to do with the Federal Reserve. More and more conditions resemble the early thirties in that respect, meaning no respect for monetary powers. This isn’t to say we are repeating the Great Depression, only that the paths available to the system to use in order to climb out of this mess have similarly narrowed. That’s what’s ultimately going to matter the most, not what...

These things are actually quite related, though I understand how it might not appear to be that way at first. As noted earlier today, the Fed (yet again) proves it has no idea how global money markets work. They can’t even get federal funds right after two technical adjustments to IOER (the joke). But as esoteric as all that may be, recent corporate statements leave much less doubt at least as to the primary effect....

The politics of oil are complicated, to say the least. There’s any number of important players, from OPEC to North American shale to sanctions. Relating to that last one, the US government has sought to impose serious restrictions upon the Iranian regime. Choking off a major piece of that country’s revenue, and source for dollars, has been a stated US goal. In May, the Trump administration formally withdrew from the...

In June 2012, Janet Yellen, then the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, addressed an audience in Boston with what for the time seemed like a radical departure. It was the latest in a string of them, for conditions throughout the “recovery” period never did quite seem to hit the recovery stride. Because of that, there was constant stream of trial balloons suggesting how the Federal Reserve might try to overcome this...

JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon caused a stir yesterday with his 45-page annual letter to shareholders. The phrase that gained him so much widespread attention was, “there is something wrong with the US.” Dimon mentioned secular stagnation and correctly surmised it was the right idea if for the wrong reasons. He then gave his own which included a litany of globalist agenda items, including not enough access to mortgages. I...