Jeffrey Snider

John Maynard Keynes was no fan of gold. Neither he nor any human being could eat it, and the amount of effort and labor expended at times to dig the metal up out of the ground seemed...

Long before the city would become infamous for reasons of viral civilizational hazard, Wuhan had been unappreciated previously as the near epicenter of another symptom of...

Fred Schultz was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve during one of those watershed periods that come up consistently throughout history. No Economist, he was a Korean Army vet...

At the end of every August, key central bankers from the US and around the world gather in Jackson Hole. This year, like last year, they’ll do so “virtually.”...

It was a very tense period, one of those moments in time when you just knew there would be no going back from it. We’ve been able to deconstruct several of these over the...

Corporate CEO’s have earned their places in most, certainly many cases. If there is one thing we should expect from them, it is to know the business of the businesses they run....

It was another one of those historical developments that meant far more than it otherwise had seemed. Not necessarily hidden agendas, more along the lines of the changing times; a...

If there is an inverse to fedspeak, Alan Greenspan’s infamous tendency to shroud monetary policy in the cloak of intentional obfuscation, it would have to be what’s...

As hard as it may be to unpack the tangled mess that is the global monetary system, something I wrote many years ago about an important early stage of evolution away from gold...

Why doesn’t the market care about these inflation reports? First, by writing “market” I mean actual markets in bonds. Despite now three huge CPI’s in a row in...

It was like some huge thunderclap, an obvious disturbance which, by the end, contributed so much to how history unfolded. But like some unsolved cold case financial...

An oxymoron, to be sure, there have been numerous failures of “government intelligence” just in the 21st century. Iraq WMD may or may not have been intentionally...

So many dots, so little time. Actually, only a few dots, quite a ton of unearned noise. If we’re talking about dots again then that could only mean doing the same thing and...

What’s the harm? Even if it doesn’t work well or much at all, this QE stuff can’t hurt. Sure, it’s a lot of noise but that’s really the point;...

We have seen the enemy, and he is us. Oliver Hazard Perry, of course, had first used the line “we have met the enemy, and he is ours” during the War of 1812 after a...

There’s just the one Treasury market, isn’t there? The same has been assumed of the money market, too. Singular blocks which operate something like a Medieval...

We live in a non-linear world, and that means, among other things, rate of change governs everything whether we consciously perceive this or not. Sometimes tampering with the slope...

It comes from a central bank, yet is it money? This has taken too many years, but over the last several, interest in, and debate over, what bank reserves are and maybe ought to be...

What if, in order to buy a house, you had to find upwards of fifty different coins weighing 9 kilograms in silver? In lieu of those, a gold coin would suffice but extremely hard to...

Even before he was elected President, it was said that Franklin Roosevelt was given a clear choice by one of his closest advisors. George F. Warren was an economist who, like Irving...

Could low repo haircuts on US Treasury collateral actually be a source of potential danger? That it might be is itself a profound statement in the ongoing saga of shadow money and...

Not quite halfway into his one term occupying the White House, President Carter was clearly fed up. Rising into that office ostensibly to accomplish what his hapless predecessor...

Always, always the interest rate fallacy. Like last week my examination of Economics tardily discovering interesting and key facts on collateral in the world’s primary monetary...

Though it wasn’t the first time, and not among the majors, still New Zealand’s Reserve Bank (RBNZ) earlier this week found itself unable to complete a full QE operation....

It was a Sunday, but no ordinary end to that particular weekend. There was much to be done before the workweek could begin the following morning. At 5 pm in the Eastern time zone of...

From the outside, pinned to the glass window pane settled in place long ago by conventional Economics, looking inward at these mechanics created only confusion and unsettling angst....

Would Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen call Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell into her decorated, historic office to demand the central bank rescue the Treasury market? If she did,...

What makes “safe” assets perceived in that way isn’t really their price. Most often, the idea relates to the fact that there is a dependable market for its class...

You might not know it, but there’s another SLF “cliff” upcoming at the end of this year’s first quarter. This Supplementary Leverage Ratio seeks to impose...

Computing power being what it was in the eighties, still the financial system was at the leading edge of technological prowess. Big money involved, huge money, had meant...

The roaring dot-com era of the late nineties created all kinds of headaches for the Federal Reserve. While its leader, the “maestro” Alan Greenspan, was referring...

Busted auction. Hard to imagine today, if for very different reasons, in March 1920 the Treasury Department found itself without enough bids for its overgrown needs. Intending to...

Moved by the visible desolation outside his shabby little doorway which day after day had been practically shoved in his face, Samuel Gompers would go on to become one of the most...

He actually meant it to be soothing, a reassuring statement of clear and unequivocal support for a reeling market. This statement, however, was received in the exact opposite way....

Was it worth saving a single million? There was a time period when such a sum was significant. That time is beyond the memory of anyone alive. In the years since the Great Inflation...

What does attitude have to do with anything? For a modern Economist or central banker (same thing), it’s everything. Expectations-based monetary policy calls for, and depends...