Jeffrey Snider

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...