Tag Archives: Markets

A momentous day, for sure, but one lost in what would turn out to be a seemingly endless sea of them. October 8, 2008, right in the thick of the world’s first global financial crisis (how could it have been global, surely not subprime mortgages?) the Federal Reserve took center stage; or tried to. Having bungled Lehman, botched AIG, and then surrendered to Treasury which then screwed up TARP, the world’s entire financial edifice was burning down while US...

It’s not just the trade data from individual countries. Take the WTO’s estimates which are derived from exports and imports going into or out of nearly all of them. These figures show that for all that recovery glory being printed up out of Uncle Sam’s checkbook, the American West Coast might be the only place where we can find anything resembling Warren Buffett’s red-hot claim. That’s a problem, and much bigger one that may otherwise appear especially given current...

As my esteemed podcast co-host Emil Kalinowski has already mentioned (recurrently), we have, this year, two major anniversaries during these dog days of summer circled on our calendar. Today is, obviously, August 9 and for anyone the slightest familiar with the eurodollar story, that date is seared into their consciousness for as long as it will take to rebuild from the ashes created by the monetary fire lit that day. It has been, sadly, fourteen long years and only...

Remember “The New Normal”? Back in 2009, Bill Gross, the old bond king before Gundlach came along, penned a market commentary called “On the Course to a New Normal” which he said would be: “a period of time in which economies grow very slowly as opposed to growing like weeds, the way children do; in which profits are relatively static; in which the government plays a significant role in terms of deficits and reregulation and control of the economy; in which the...

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: About US$275 billion (about SDR 193 billion) of the new allocation will go to emerging markets and developing countries, including low-income countries. This from the IMF’s July 30, 2021, statement gleefully announcing its governing body(ies) has(d) agreed to a general allocation of $650 billion in SDR’s, biggest in history, according to existing quotas. The purpose: “to boost existing liquidity.” This really does sounds very...

Searching for clues or even small collateral indications, you can’t leave out the gold market. We’ve been on the lookout for scarcity primarily via the T-bill market, and that’s a good place to start, yet looking back to last March the relationship between bills and bullion was uniquely strong. It’s therefore a persuasive pattern if or when it turns up again. To recap the main push of last year’s acute dollar shortage: Over the past several dreadful weeks of...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]If you were waiting for a correction in stock prices to put some money to work, you got your chance last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly 1000 points at the low Monday and closed down 725, a loss of a little over 2%. The S&P 500 did a little better but closed down 1.5%.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]89.2 China Warns World of (Next?) Dollar Disorder. The People’s Bank of China lowers its bank Required Reserve Ratio to get money into a slowing economy. A lowered RRR means that there aren’t enough (euro)dollars flowing into China. Why? Because there aren’t enough (euro)dollars in the world. A lower RRR is a warning for the whole world.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Global factors, meaning that the wave of significantly higher deflationary potential (therefore, diminishing inflationary chances which were never good to begin with) in global bond yields the past five months have seemingly focused on troubles brewing outside the US. Overseas turmoil, it was called back in 2015, leaving by default a picture of relative American strength and harmony.

Back on February 23, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell stopped by (in a virtual, Zoom sense) the Senate Banking Committee to testify as required by law. In the Q&A portion, he was asked the following by Montana’s Senator Steve Daines: SENATOR DAINES. I just was looking at the T bill chart and noticing since the 1st of February, the one month rates have dropped in half from 0.06 to today 0.03, two months went from 0.07, to 0.02. We’re starting to get into that...