Posted in dollar, doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy on June 10, 2008 | No Comments »
on today’s seismic Treasury selloff:
“The point is that the world was long Treasury, and we can see how they’ve been suckered.”
In other news, more insanity from the federales, who think they can permanently reduce commodities prices by shoving out leveraged players.
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, politics, wall street on June 8, 2008 | No Comments »
Thomas Palley, Open Society Institute pontificator emeritus cum DC-cocktail laude, mocks himself best when he’s most honest. As do most political people.
Defending the Bernanke Fed
Filed under: U.S. Policy, Uncategorized — Administrator @ 6:37 am
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has recently been on the receiving end of significant criticism for recent monetary policy. One critique [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, doomsterism, economy, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, politics on May 28, 2008 | No Comments »
“With Bold Steps, Fed Chief Quiets Some Criticism”:
[...]
“It has been a really head-spinning range of unprecedented and bold actions,” said Charles W. Calomiris, professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, referring to the Fed’s lending activities. “That is exactly as it should be. But I’m not saying that it’s without some cost and [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy on May 28, 2008 | No Comments »
Posted in doomsterism, federal reserve, global macro, inflation, monetary policy, wall street on May 24, 2008 | No Comments »
… underwritten by PIMCO’s Bill Gross.
Just in time for the huge TIPS burp a couple of nights ago, when massive buying pushed the 5-year TIPS yield down to -.77.
I’ve been a huge fan of the SS hypothesis for a long time, so it’s good to see the world’s biggest fixed income guru practically copy-paste from [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, doomsterism, economy, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, politics, shitigroup, volatility, wall street on May 18, 2008 | No Comments »
The credit crisis has separated true libertarians from phony libertarians, and separated true liberals from phony liberals.
The phony liberals have inadvertently mocked themselves throughout the entire credit crisis, manning the barricades to defend the greatest act of socialism for the rich in US history. Ditto for supposed “libertarians,” eg Robert Rubin, Bruce Kovner, and the [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy on May 15, 2008 | No Comments »
Bernanke wingman Frederic Mishkin today, parroting Barney Frank:
I would like to emphasize the importance of regulatory policy. Monetary policy–that is, the setting of overnight interest rates–is already challenged by the task of managing both price stability and maximum sustainable employment. As a result, it falls to regulatory policies and supervisory practices to help strengthen the [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, federal reserve, wall street on May 12, 2008 | No Comments »
You should tell them that the Rubin- and Krugman-endorsed bailout of the US financial sector has cost $475 billion in Fed stocks of US Treasuries. $1,500 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
Granted, those Treasuries have been swapped for MBS. But if it weren’t for the price support provided by the Federal [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy on May 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Regular finance-focused readers have probably noticed that I’ve neglected economic commentary recently. That’s because 1) there hasn’t been much net marginal information recently to clarify what I see right now (monstrous reflation in the West, looming monstrous deflation in the East, looming war in the Mid-East, commodities as The Big Thing through late July). 2) [...]
Posted in dollar, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, wall street on May 2, 2008 | No Comments »
May 2 (Bloomberg) — A month after the Federal Reserve rescued Bear Stearns Cos. from bankruptcy, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke got an S.O.S. from Congress.
There is “a potential crisis in the student-loan market” requiring “similar bold action,” Chairman Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and six other Democrats wrote Bernanke. They want the Fed to swap Treasury [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, volatility on April 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Forget about NYC ever recapturing London’s financial crown. What sane hedge fund manager would de-privatize all his information, and submit to “surveillance” by the very Praetorians who have exacerbated every shock of the last 20 years?
Treasury eyes stronger powers for Fed
By Gillian Tett in London and Krishna Guha in Washington
Published: April 29 2008 23:23 | [...]
Posted in federal reserve, haha on April 27, 2008 | No Comments »
“Greenspan came onto my radar screen in the late sixties as a seller
of economic and financial advice to the investment industry. To be
brutally honest, he was considered run of the mill by anyone I knew
then or have met later who knew his service then. His high point in
most memories, was a famous call in January [...]
Posted in dollar, doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy on April 25, 2008 | 8 Comments »
What would happen when non-government T-bill chumps figure out that they’re getting between negative 5 percent and negative 9 percent real interest on a 2-year Treasury note?
… In March, consumer prices rose 0.34 percent, for an annualized rate of more than 4 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s only slightly lower than [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, wall street on April 20, 2008 | No Comments »
I have always thought that there’s something uniquely soporifying about DC that makes most who live there especially complacent and/or ignorant, kind of like the lead plumbing of many “established” Roman cities poisoned most urban dwellers into senility by age 55.
George Will, though, gets it. He has just enough of a flicker of cynicism for [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, politics, shitigroup, wall street on April 16, 2008 | No Comments »
The bailout of Bear Stearns was, in effect, a bailout of JPMorgan Chase.
Chase wrote the most credit default swaps of anyone. They also had by far the largest number of open but uncleared swaps (i.e., JPMC sells one side of the swap to a counterparty, but cannot spin off its own side — overwhelmingly, the [...]
Posted in dollar, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy on April 14, 2008 | No Comments »
“More, faster, please.” I don’t agree with every single sentence here, but by far the most important issue is Bernanke’s inflationist fundamentalism. Without further ado–
How Greenspan & Bernanke Invalidated Friedman
Monday, April 14, 2008 | 03:01 PM
in Credit | Derivatives | Economy | Politics
Hedge fund manager Scott Frew is a friend and occasional fishing partner. He [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, doomsterism, federal reserve, monetary policy, volatility, wall street on April 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Didn’t see this gem anywhere in US business media. What an Orwellian “surprise” that is.
The Greenspan Fed: a tragedy of errors
Mr Greenspan’s apologia pro vita sua in the Financial Times of Monday, April 7 2008 fails to convince.
The Greenspan Fed (August 1987 - January 2006) did indeed contribute, through excessively lax monetary policy, to the [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, wall street on April 12, 2008 | No Comments »
WTF:
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, one of the more remote contingencies the Federal Reserve has considered is a mirror image of the Term Securities Lending Facility: it would take the mortgage backed securities pledged to it by dealers in return for Treasurys; then repledge them to other dealers, taking Treasurys back. Since the [...]
Posted in doomsterism, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, wall street on April 10, 2008 | No Comments »
This excellent WSJ graphic has made its way around the financial internets quite a bit in the past 24 hours, and it seems like a good trend to follow.
After all the 4-letter facilities, the repo injections, the alleged repo rollovers, and so on, we have a fairly precise approximation — 35 percent of $910 billion [...]
Posted in dawn to decadence, dollar, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, volatility, wall street on April 10, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Greg Ip wrote a momentous column today.
Fed Weighs Its Options in Easing Crunch
By GREG IP
April 9, 2008; Page A3
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve is considering contingency plans for expanding its lending power in the event its recent steps to unfreeze credit markets fail.
Among the options: Having the Treasury borrow more money than it needs to fund the [...]
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