Jeffrey Snider

The timing could not have been worse, though in the grand scheme of things it is just perfect. It was barely two weeks ago when Jay Powell was announcing what he and others were...

As it turns out, there actually was a Murphy. His now ubiquitous American idiom, Murphy’s Law, is well-known to everyone: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. The reason...

They didn’t do these things in those days. This was before the current age of transparency in central banking, back when Montagu Norman’s dictum was more widely regarded....

On March 26, 2018, Chinese authorities began allowing seven different grades of crude oil to be traded on Shanghai’s International Energy Exchange. Since this specific...

It was an especially tense exchange. The Fed Chairman was trying to withstand withering criticism from an openly hostile and substantial segment of Congress. It was the hot summer of...

The year 1930 was certainly one of the most unique in history, the majority of it anyway. Sandwiched between the massive stock market shake-up begun the prior October, in 1929, and...

You know something’s truly amiss when the government reports the economy has just experienced its worst quarter maybe ever and hardly anyone cares. For one thing, it’s...

Sylvain Maréchal would write in the Manifesto of Equals in the confused and economically devastated France of 1796 that, “We demand real equality, or Death;...

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 “for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the...

Each time it was tried, they were rushed. Revolutionary leadership may be many things, but one thing they haven’t been historically is patient. There’s a whole lot of...

For most people, I suspect, they’d be unaware of what has been lurking in the shadows for so long, for the better part of a decade, that today the purported wisdom of it is...

It was like something out of a nightmare, the 21st Century’s infatuation with zombies maybe taking its root from the very real terrors of the 19th Century. When it...

The great euphoria surrounding the May 2020 payroll report didn’t even last a week. It should never have taken place. There is a meaningful difference between people getting...

In 1931, as the Great Depression tightened its grip on the world, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw accompanied Lady Nancy Astor on a highly publicized trip to the Soviet Union....

Companies in the US as well as around the world have participated in an all-out debt binge. This hasn’t been because of the Federal Reserve’s actions; on the contrary,...

You can always tell what won’t happen by the way in which Congress titles its laws. In March 1980, President Carter was fighting for re-election. While the Soviets had invaded...

A sign of weakness, strength, or something else altogether? Back in ’85 when government officials got together at the Plaza Hotel in New York and told the world they controlled...

It can be an amazing thing to discover. While conducting primary research by going back into actual historical records, finding gems of this kind is a unique, sometimes satisfying...

Germany’s government was only just beginning to tackle the problem. Chancellor Angela Merkel had earlier advised German states to cancel any events where large groups might...

It was a pandemic, of sorts, a diseasing infestation that demanded the strictest economic curtailment. The consequences of the resulting quarantine and shutdown were extreme, so...

The government of Great Britain had sunk more than £17,000 in Charles Babbage’s project by 1832 and wanted to see what had been accomplished with the funds. Babbage was a...

In 1953, Milton Friedman staked his case for the demise of fixed exchange rates. The classical gold standard, he argued, had been a one-time aberration. The dramatic growth of the...

Eurodollar futures contracts are cash settled using an index tied to 3-month LIBOR. Therefore, it can pay handsomely to figure out where 3-month LIBOR will be at specific points in...

This isn’t random. Neither the crisis nor its timing. If it feels a lot like 2008 right now that’s because, in large part, nothing was learned from the first Global...

It is very easy at times like these to slip into the old comforts of grand historical figures. Given the nature of the incidents, a viral infection of illiquidity upon the world,...

As the Federal Reserve struggles desperately trying to sort out its rate policy situation, the debate still rages as to whether or not the recent small-scale asset purchase program...

In John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the concluding chapters deal with, among other problems, the possibility of persistently low...

What do you do if you find your country in the midst of a currency war? For Brazil’s Finance Minister in early 2011 the response seemed clear enough. After all, it had been...

He was a bear who was surrounded by ducks, and so one day he decided to slaughter some ducks to show he was still a bear. That was how one Russian political analyst put the March...

Standing for reelection that year, the President motored up to Capitol Hill for the annual tradition of the State of the Union. Having come into office under tumultuous...

In the wake of last September’s repo outbreak, the Federal Reserve under Chairman Jay Powell decided his institution needed to do two things simultaneously. The central bank...

The name Arturo Estrella rings only specific bells whenever his name is brought up. Credited with “discovering” the predictive power of the yield curve, what Dr. Estrella...

On September 21, 2011, Ben Bernanke’s Fed announced Operation Twist. Actually, it was Twist #2 since the Fed had first thought up and executed a program like it all the way...

Back in January 2003, Mexico’s Undersecretary of Commerce, Maria del Rocio Ruiz, admitted to the LA Times, “We cannot export $6 jeans.” Her country was at a...

What a way to end one decade and begin another – in the same place. Though they are separated by a whole lot more than just the Pacific Ocean, they are institutions caught up...