Tag Archives: taper tantrum

Over the second half of January, we witnessed a fresh wave of volatility in equity markets, culminating in a pullback that caused widespread concern and endless headlines in the mainstream financial press. There was speculation of a full blown correction, other “experts” disagreed and predicted that central bankers would never allow that to happen, while others still tried to account for the market’s moves by using the same explanations we’ve been hearing throughout the covid crisis...

What would it look like if the Treasury market was forced into a cross between 2013 and 2018? I think it might be something like late 2021. Before getting to that, however, we have to get through the business of decoding the yield curve since Economics and the financial media have done such a thorough job of getting it entirely wrong (see: Greenspan below). And before we can even do that, some recent housekeeping at the front of the curve where bill lives. 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,...

The Fed meets this week and is widely expected to say that it is talking about maybe reducing bond purchases sometime later this year or maybe next year or at least, someday. Jerome Powell will hold a press conference at which he’ll tell us that markets have nothing to worry about because even if they taper QE, interest rates aren’t going up for a long, long time. That statement might have more credibility if the Fed had been right about just about anything over the...

The Fed meets this week and is widely expected to say that it is talking about maybe reducing bond purchases sometime later this year or maybe next year or at least, someday. Jerome Powell will hold a press conference at which he’ll tell us that markets have nothing to worry about because even if they taper QE, interest rates aren’t going up for a long, long time. That statement might have more credibility if the Fed had been right about just about anything over the...

Whomever actually coined the term “taper”, using it in the context of Federal Reserve QE for the first time, it wasn’t actually Ben Bernanke. On May 22, 2013, the central bank’s Chairman sat in front of Congressman Kevin Brady and used the phrase “step down in our pace of purchases.” No good, at least from the perspective of a media-driven need for a snappy one-word summary. Taper. Then the tantrum. Except, no, it wasn’t sulking rage over the prospects for fewer...

In our July 29 post titled How Gold Stacks Up Against Stocks, Property, Commodities and Big Macs! we showed readers charts of gold as a ratio to other assets and products. We discussed that gold competes with crypto and stocks for the investment dollars. It was clear that gold as a ratio of the S&P 500 Index and of the broader MCSI World Equity Index show that gold is ‘relatively cheap’ compared to these measures. But then we showed that this wasn’t the...

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...