Tag Archives: policy mix

(Business travel will prevent me from updating the blog for the next couple of days.  Thank you for your patience.  Good luck.) Overview: After extending last week’s moves yesterday, the capital markets are mostly calmer today. Sterling is firmer, as are UK Gilts. The dollar is mostly consolidating inside yesterday’s range. Equities are stable to higher. Most of the large markets in the Asia Pacific region, but India edged higher, led by a 1.45% gain in China’s CSI...

One of the stark developments since the initial shock of the pandemic has been the aggressiveness of the US monetary and fiscal response. This was also true in dealing with the Great Financial Crisis. The divergence then and now had shaped the investment climate. On a per-capita basis, the pandemic struck the US harder than in most other high-income countries, and some see the wide disparity of income and wealth as a contributing factor. In any event, the vaccine...

Panel with Elga Bartsch, Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, Giancarlo Corsetti, Olivier Garnier, and Charles Wyplosz. Moderated by Tobias Broer. Elga Bartsch, Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, Giancarlo Corsetti, Xavier Debrun: Geneva Report 23 | It’s All in the Mix: How Monetary and Fiscal policies Can Work or Fail Together. Event at PSE. My comments on the report.

The foreign exchange market sees an average daily turnover of something on the magnitude of $6.6 trillion a day.  In a week, the turnover is sufficient to more than cover world trade for a year.  It is the largest of the capital markets.  Trends in the currency market can last for years. A little more than a year ago, we concluded that the dollar’s third significant rally since the end of Bretton Woods was over and that a cyclical dollar decline was at hand.  Yet the...

After falling in July and August, the US dollar strengthened against most of the major currencies in September.  The dramatic pullback in equities seemed to have undergirded the yen’s resilience, which gained a net 0.25% against the dollar.  However, the dollar’s broadly firmer tone appears corrective and consolidative in nature and coincided with the downturn in equities, especially high flying US tech shares.  Risk assets, in general, succumbed to profit-taking...

I know some people who are always bullish gold. I am not. In fact, I often think I can find higher returning assets. However, I have recently have turned bullish gold, and while in Toronto on business, I was invited to the set of Bloomberg to discuss my change of heart. Many of the reasons the gold bugs cite would seem to justify owning gold bullion not paper claims on gold, like gold mining companies or gold ETFs. The...

Summary: Divergence between US and Canada’s two-year rates is key for USD-CAD exchange rate. Canada’s 2 hikes in Q3 were not part of a sustained tightening sequence. Policy mix considerations also favor the greenback if US policy becomes more stimulative. Many observers saw Canada as one of the canaries in the coal mine, warning that the divergence theme was over.  The Bank of Canada did hike rates twice in...

Summary: Review of recent BIS report. US election spurred a substantial change in sentiment. Equity and bond market reactions are roughly similar to when Reagan was elected, with the dollar, at least initially, stronger than then. The Bank of International Settlement asks in its quarterly report if there has been “a paradigm shift in the markets?”   Although it does not provide an explicit answer, it does...

Introduction by George Dorgan My articles About meMy booksFollow on:TwitterFacebookGoogle +YoutubeSeeking AlphaCFA SocietyLinkedINEconomicBlogs Summary: Federal spending growth under Obama is lower than under the previous four presidents. Subsequent to the chart, US federal spending has increased. It will likely increase more under the next President. The US policy mix is changing. The trajectory of...