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Sep 30, 2022
This isn’t the first time Xi Jinping was said to have disappeared unexpectedly. And it isn’t the first time Xi was unaccounted for in the weeks leading up to a crucial...
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Sep 23, 2022
You would have thought him a prosecutor knee-deep rooting out corruption. The man detested the very possibility of anyone scheming under his nose. But Jean-Claude Trichet...
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Sep 16, 2022
Hardly any of us know how an automobile actually provides locomotion. Sure, we understand fuel goes in it somewhere, combustion provides the required power, forcing the vehicle...
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Sep 9, 2022
Humans invent monsters as a way to cope with their own imperfect knowledge. Norse sailors traveling around the various seas observed a gigantic, long-legged creature and without any...
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Sep 2, 2022
For the last several years, the behavior of Japan’s yen against the US dollar is near perfectly correlated with the eight-week average of US$ repo fails. From the outside,...
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Aug 26, 2022
In nearly every questionable case, when a politician like a central banker tells you that the economy is doing just swell, you’re safe to assume you’ve been lied to. Part...
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Aug 19, 2022
It remains one of those instances when you see something for the first time, truly take in the thing, you can never unsee it. Explanations for the seventies Great Inflation to this...
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Aug 12, 2022
Adam Smith was sufficiently brilliant to simply call it the invisible hand and leave it alone. How does individual business make the miraculous seem ordinary enough to be taken for...
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Aug 5, 2022
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) was empaneled to have the final say on the 2008 panic. A political affair though not necessarily partisan, its true purpose was to get...
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Jul 29, 2022
There is something about repo which repels mainstream curiosity. It’s more than weird, how throughout their long history repurchase agreements have gone so studiously...
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Jul 22, 2022
At first, they really thought the price pressures would be transitory. After some reconsideration, they changed their collective minds. Oil markets were rampaging, seemingly nothing...
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Jul 15, 2022
The chaotic global breakdown of March 2020 did a lot of things, including adding more unnecessary pressure to an already-reeling pandemic-shocked world. Authorities have spent the...
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Jul 8, 2022
We’ve been fooled into believing there is no longer a monetary Pole Star by which to accurately triangulate our current financial position. Speaking in terms of money, finance,...
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Jun 24, 2022
The word “supercycle” was nearly as overused as inflation has been. In fact, the two very much related; the latter the major thesis behind the former. History shows that...
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Jun 17, 2022
A popular catchphrase from the once-popular Game Of Thrones was “winter is coming.” Set in the fantasy world of the HBO drama, winters weren’t seasonal in...
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Jun 10, 2022
Warned more than six months ago it was all starting to seriously go awry, the steady stream of increasingly dire messages went unheeded. The eurodollar futures curve first inverted...
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Jun 3, 2022
The situation in February 1981 was unexpected, which had simply become the norm. Oil prices from 1979 had put the US economy into a tailspin by the first half of 1980, a development...
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May 27, 2022
Feces and fans. Never a good combination for anyone who happens to be near the spinning blades, basic logic and common sense dictate the only way to achieve a positive resolution is...
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May 20, 2022
These are the words never to be uttered. Not if you know what is good for you. They have nothing to do with national security. No secret formulas locked tightly away from prying...
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May 13, 2022
The premium paid for cash had reached 4% over deposits, an unthinkably huge charge for liquidity. American economist Abram Piatt Andrew Jr. lamented how such a rate hadn’t...
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May 6, 2022
Repo gets all of what tiny little bit of attention the world might pay (pun intended) to collateral. It shouldn’t be the sole star of this deeper shadow money world. There are...
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Apr 29, 2022
Weird doesn’t even begin to describe it. You are a hedge fund, let’s say, and your business is buying risky longer-term bonds leveraging a menu of short-term funding...
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Apr 22, 2022
At root of the petrodollar error, that there is a petrodollar, is the very idea that governments monopolize money. You hear the claim repeated incessantly, a power,...
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Apr 8, 2022
Interest rates were skyrocketing, a real sell-off. Bond yields way up, money markets, too. There was intense pressure from seemingly everywhere, including out in the federal funds...
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Apr 1, 2022
There is no such thing as a petrodollar. Yet, the term continues to garner use in today’s discussions about global currencies and financial arrangements. The word is...
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Mar 25, 2022
So much easier said than done, this saga has now extended to nearly mark an entire decade spent wasted on bureaucratic demands at the expense of common sense. Typical, I know....
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Mar 18, 2022
It was late on a Sunday afternoon, an unusual time for these kinds of things. The prior week had been utter chaos, and everything which had been tried up until that day seemed like...
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Mar 11, 2022
Demographic denouement, an end to an era of fluid labor supply leaving the world exposed to the eventual maybe inevitable, they say, sustained rise of cost pressures. A globalized...
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Mar 4, 2022
Although there are several, one of the more colorful and dramatic of the eurodollar’s origin stories has to do with Russian dollars. For all kinds of reasons in the fifties,...
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Feb 25, 2022
It’s not unusual for national institutions, like foreign exchange managers, to maintain deposit balances with supranational financial agencies such as the IMF or BIS. In fact,...
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Feb 18, 2022
With consumer and wholesale prices surging, the Federal Reserve was under severe pressure to do something about the economic situation. Its top officials went to the White House, to...
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Feb 11, 2022
When the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal back last March, it was a perfect metaphor for the times. Among the largest ships ever built, crashing headlong into the right bank of...
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Feb 4, 2022
Humans love round numbers, attaching cultural or other kinds of significance and meaning to them for as long as we’ve used numbers. Most of the time, reaching an even level is...
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Jan 28, 2022
The timing was somewhat curious, yet understandable given the actual context. If something like it happened today, it would’ve been splashed all over the headlines. Even as the...
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Jan 21, 2022
It was disaster averted. Joy would actually reign in Mudville after all. Whereas the Mighty Casey had fallen short in his mythologized turn at the bat, the beleaguered Bills of...
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Jan 14, 2022
The winter was the worst it had been in forty years, and this was during a time when winters were especially brutal. In camp near Morristown, New Jersey, the half-starved,...
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Jan 7, 2022
A little less than six months ago, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real GDP for last year’s second quarter in the US had regained its pre-COVID high set back in...
Sep 30, 2022This isn’t the first time Xi Jinping was said to have disappeared unexpectedly. And it isn’t the first time Xi was unaccounted for in the weeks leading up to a crucial...
Sep 23, 2022You would have thought him a prosecutor knee-deep rooting out corruption. The man detested the very possibility of anyone scheming under his nose. But Jean-Claude Trichet...
Sep 9, 2022Humans invent monsters as a way to cope with their own imperfect knowledge. Norse sailors traveling around the various seas observed a gigantic, long-legged creature and without any...
Sep 2, 2022For the last several years, the behavior of Japan’s yen against the US dollar is near perfectly correlated with the eight-week average of US$ repo fails. From the outside,...
Aug 26, 2022In nearly every questionable case, when a politician like a central banker tells you that the economy is doing just swell, you’re safe to assume you’ve been lied to. Part...
Aug 19, 2022It remains one of those instances when you see something for the first time, truly take in the thing, you can never unsee it. Explanations for the seventies Great Inflation to this...
Aug 12, 2022Adam Smith was sufficiently brilliant to simply call it the invisible hand and leave it alone. How does individual business make the miraculous seem ordinary enough to be taken for...
Aug 5, 2022The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) was empaneled to have the final say on the 2008 panic. A political affair though not necessarily partisan, its true purpose was to get...
Jul 22, 2022At first, they really thought the price pressures would be transitory. After some reconsideration, they changed their collective minds. Oil markets were rampaging, seemingly nothing...
Jul 15, 2022The chaotic global breakdown of March 2020 did a lot of things, including adding more unnecessary pressure to an already-reeling pandemic-shocked world. Authorities have spent the...
Jul 8, 2022We’ve been fooled into believing there is no longer a monetary Pole Star by which to accurately triangulate our current financial position. Speaking in terms of money, finance,...
Jun 24, 2022The word “supercycle” was nearly as overused as inflation has been. In fact, the two very much related; the latter the major thesis behind the former. History shows that...
Jun 17, 2022A popular catchphrase from the once-popular Game Of Thrones was “winter is coming.” Set in the fantasy world of the HBO drama, winters weren’t seasonal in...
Jun 10, 2022Warned more than six months ago it was all starting to seriously go awry, the steady stream of increasingly dire messages went unheeded. The eurodollar futures curve first inverted...
Jun 3, 2022The situation in February 1981 was unexpected, which had simply become the norm. Oil prices from 1979 had put the US economy into a tailspin by the first half of 1980, a development...
May 20, 2022These are the words never to be uttered. Not if you know what is good for you. They have nothing to do with national security. No secret formulas locked tightly away from prying...
May 6, 2022Repo gets all of what tiny little bit of attention the world might pay (pun intended) to collateral. It shouldn’t be the sole star of this deeper shadow money world. There are...
Apr 29, 2022Weird doesn’t even begin to describe it. You are a hedge fund, let’s say, and your business is buying risky longer-term bonds leveraging a menu of short-term funding...
Apr 22, 2022At root of the petrodollar error, that there is a petrodollar, is the very idea that governments monopolize money. You hear the claim repeated incessantly, a power,...
Apr 8, 2022Interest rates were skyrocketing, a real sell-off. Bond yields way up, money markets, too. There was intense pressure from seemingly everywhere, including out in the federal funds...
Mar 25, 2022So much easier said than done, this saga has now extended to nearly mark an entire decade spent wasted on bureaucratic demands at the expense of common sense. Typical, I know....
Mar 18, 2022It was late on a Sunday afternoon, an unusual time for these kinds of things. The prior week had been utter chaos, and everything which had been tried up until that day seemed like...
Mar 11, 2022Demographic denouement, an end to an era of fluid labor supply leaving the world exposed to the eventual maybe inevitable, they say, sustained rise of cost pressures. A globalized...
Mar 4, 2022Although there are several, one of the more colorful and dramatic of the eurodollar’s origin stories has to do with Russian dollars. For all kinds of reasons in the fifties,...
Feb 25, 2022It’s not unusual for national institutions, like foreign exchange managers, to maintain deposit balances with supranational financial agencies such as the IMF or BIS. In fact,...
Feb 18, 2022With consumer and wholesale prices surging, the Federal Reserve was under severe pressure to do something about the economic situation. Its top officials went to the White House, to...
Feb 11, 2022When the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal back last March, it was a perfect metaphor for the times. Among the largest ships ever built, crashing headlong into the right bank of...
Feb 4, 2022Humans love round numbers, attaching cultural or other kinds of significance and meaning to them for as long as we’ve used numbers. Most of the time, reaching an even level is...
Jan 21, 2022It was disaster averted. Joy would actually reign in Mudville after all. Whereas the Mighty Casey had fallen short in his mythologized turn at the bat, the beleaguered Bills of...
Jan 14, 2022The winter was the worst it had been in forty years, and this was during a time when winters were especially brutal. In camp near Morristown, New Jersey, the half-starved,...
Jan 7, 2022A little less than six months ago, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real GDP for last year’s second quarter in the US had regained its pre-COVID high set back in...