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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...