Tag Archives: Interest Rate

James Grant, Wall Street expert and editor of the renowned investment newsletter «Grant’s Interest Rate Observer», warns of the unseen consequences of super low interest rate and questions the extraordinary actions of the Swiss National Bank. Nearly ten years after the financial crisis, extraordinary monetary policy has become the norm. The financial markets seem to like it: Stocks are close to record levels...

Authored by Christoph Gisiger via Finanz und Wirtschaft, James Grant, Wall Street expert and editor of the renowned investment newsletter «Grant’s Interest Rate Observer», warns of the unseen consequences of super low interest rate and questions the extraordinary actions of the Swiss National Bank. Nearly ten years after the financial crisis, extraordinary monetary policy has become the norm.   The financial markets seem to like it: Stocks are close to record levels and...

World stocks eased back from record highs and fell for the first time in eight days, as jitters about Catalonia’s independence push returned while bets on higher U.S. interest rates sent the dollar to its highest since mid August; S&P 500 futures were modestly in the red – as they have been every day this week before levitating to record highs – ahead of hurricane-distorted nonfarm payrolls data (full preview here)....

In a (December 2015) Bank of England Staff Working Paper, Lukasz Rachel and Thomas Smith dissect the global decline in long-term real interest rates over the last thirty years. A summary of their executive summary: Market measures of long-term risk-free real interest rates have declined by around 450bps. Absent signs of overheating this suggests that the global neutral rate fell. Expected trend growth as well as other factors affecting desired savings and investment determine the neutral...

In the FT, Sam Fleming and Demetri Sevastopulo report that the White House considers Marvin Goodfriend for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. He has criticised the Fed’s crisis-era balance sheet expansion, saying the central bank should generally not purchase mortgage-backed securities, and has advocated the use of monetary policy rules to guide policy, as has Mr Quarles. … At the same time, however, Mr Goodfriend has been willing to contemplate the use of deeply negative rates to...

Whether or not San Francisco Fed President John Williams is right about US inflation and employment being about as close to the central bank’s targets as investors have seen – as he told CNBC two days ago – is irrelevant: The central bank is going to raise interest rates two more times this year no matter what happens to consumer prices, says Credit Suisse Chief Investment Officer for Switzerland Burkhard Varnholt....

We discuss the rate differentials between Switzerland, Britain, Europe, Japan and the United States and how this Developed Financial Markets carry trade is incentivizing excessive risk taking with tremendous leverage and destabilizing the entire financial system in the process in this video. You want to know what is behind weekly market records, borrowed money via punchbowl central bank liquidity. This ends badly every...

The Economist reports that implementation gradually changes: [T]he way in which the People’s Bank of China conducts monetary policy is changing. It is beginning to look a little more like central banks in developed economies as it shifts towards liberalised interest rates. Rather than simply ordering banks to set specific lending or deposit rates—the focus for many years in China—it is altering the monetary environment around them. China does not yet have an equivalent of the...

On his blog, James Hamilton summarizes a Bank of England working paper by Lukasz Rachel and Thomas Smith on the determinants of low real interest rates.

Finanz und Wirtschaft, November 23, 2016. PDF. The diagnosis is far from clear. Nor is the therapy.