Tag Archives: loans

This week will almost certainly end up as a clash of competing interest rate policy views. Everyone knows about the Federal Reserve’s upcoming, the beginning of what is intended to be a determined inflation-fighting campaign for a US economy that American policymakers worry has been overheated. The FOMC will vote to raise the federal funds range (and IOER plus RRP) for the first time since December 2018 Over in China, however, it’s nearly certain to be the opposite....

Bring on the tantrum. Forget this prevaricating, we should want and expect interest rates to get on with normalizing. It’s been a long time, verging to the insanity of a decade and a half already that keeps trending more downward through time. What’s the holdup? You can’t blame COVID at the tail end for a woeful string which actually dates back farther than the last pandemic (H1N1). Emil Kalinowski has it absolutely right; what happened in 2013 in the Treasury...

We’ve got one central bank over here in America which appears as if its members can’t wait to “taper”, bringing up both the topic and using that particular word as much as possible. Jay Powell’s Federal Reserve obviously intends to buoy confidence by projecting as much when it does cut back on the pace of its (irrelevant) QE6. On the other side of the Atlantic, Europe’s central bank will be technically be doing the same thing likely at the same time. Except,...

If there is one thing Ben Bernanke got right, it was this. In 2009 during the worst of the worst monetary crisis in four generations, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman was asked in front of Congress if we all should be worried about zombies. Senator Bob Corker wasn’t talking about the literal undead, rather a scenario much like Japan where the financial system entered a period of sustained agony – leading to the same in...

Latest Investment Outlook In his latest investment outlook, Fasanara Capital’s Franceso Filia, who two months ago explained in one chart how the “fake market” operates… … discuss what happens when a “Twin Bubble meets quantitative tightening” and answers why record-low volatility breeds market fragility and precedes system instability. We’ll have more to share on that shortly, but for now, here is Filia with his take...

Europe is as we all are. Ben Bernanke wrote a few years ago that his tenure at the Fed must have been a success in his view because the US economy didn’t perform as badly as Europe’s. As usual, this technically true comparison is for any meaningful purpose irrelevant. For one, the European economy underperformed before 2008, too. Second, after 2008, really August 9, 2007, there isn’t nearly as much difference as...

As world “leaders” gathered in Davos in January 2016, they did so among financial turmoil that was creating more economic havoc than at any time since the Great “Recession.” Having seen especially US QE as the equivalent of money printing, their focus was drawn elsewhere to at least attempt an explanation for the contradiction. They initially settled on the Fed’s rate hike, where terminating “ultra-loose” policies was...

Trump Is Right PARIS – On Wednesday, brick-and-mortar retailers – such as Macy’s – led U.S. stocks lower. The Dow lost about as much as it had gained the day before. Nothing much to talk about there… Macy’s Inc. NYSE + BATS Macy’s on the way to Zool. Macy’s Inc. NYSE + BATS – click to enlarge. When we left off yesterday, we posed two questions: Shouldn’t your editor (under torture, of course) confess his sins, renounce his apostasy, and register to vote before it is too late? And…...

Need a loan? You can always go to a bank. Or you can try to borrow from your peers. Increasingly popular “peer-to-peer lending portals” allow borrowers and lenders to connect directly through online marketplaces, threatening to disintermediate traditional financial institutions in the process. But how do peer-to-peer sites assess the risk involved in the loans they make? What role will regulation play in their future? Will institutional investors get on board? Industry experts discussed these...