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Jeffrey Snider | RCP Story Stream
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Markets Have Been Warning Us About SVB for Months March 17, 2023
Can’t say we weren’t warned. Money and bond curves have been screaming for months trouble was lurking. A decent bout of it had erupted last fall, though hardly anyone saw it for what it was. Something about the UK, a bit of dollar activity in Switzer...
Prices Point In Unison To a Dark Global Experience March 10, 2023
Have you ever noticed that whenever the US dollar’s exchange value goes up, nothing good comes from it? The simplest, most obvious correlation to make yet it has taken a decade and half for some Economists to start putting two and two together. For ...
The Irrationality That Forms the Beliefs of Janet Yellen March 03, 2023
I’m inclined to cut Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen a tiny little slack here, pun intended. Rather miffed by all this talk of recession, appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America the Monday following the release of the gigantic January jobs report, Yel...
The Very Serious Possibility Recession Has Already Happened February 24, 2023
It was a sudden and epic flood of oil the likes of which the country hadn’t seen before. According to the government’s numbers, the Energy Information Administration, over a seven-week period domestic stocks of crude gushed by a then-record 34.4 mill...
Do QEs Fix Any Economy? The Question Is Rhetorical February 17, 2023
They come in with a tremendous bang, then go out with barely a whimper, and leave us in the very same jam that kicked off the cycle. Having since completely squandered rather than simply losing an entire decade, we must first remember Haruhiko Kuroda...
In This 'Silent Depression,' Let's Destroy the Dollar All Over Again February 10, 2023
If you’ve been on the website nerdwallet.com, there truly is a lot of good and interesting stuff there. From helping you compare credit card offers to researching banks and their lending options, it even has useful information to explore insurance co...
Central Bankers Fail Upward, But We Suffer Their Failings February 03, 2023
Here it begins, an unofficial start to what will shortly be the mass official exodus from inflation-fighting first transiting through bewilderment before eventually settling in their usual climate of panic. It is as regular as any natural cycle, such...
Dollar Providers Biding Time, Betting On Collapse January 27, 2023
Among the earliest participants in the eurodollar system were Canadians. Though these dollars were floating around Europe, primarily, Canadian banks stood ready to borrow in bulk as needed. Not for their own purposes, the trade contributions therefor...
Much Like Twenty Novembers Ago, We're At the Edge of a Cliff January 20, 2023
When staring directly at the edge of a cliff, you quite naturally begin to explore all the ways in which you might avoid going over it. The closer you get, obviously the more urgent the inquiry. And that’s exactly where we find our collected selves y...
No Need To Wait For a Crisis To Confirm What We Already Know January 13, 2023
It seems like an unnecessarily inefficient method, maybe even a total waste (pun intended) of time trying to discern what an animal eats solely by observing what comes out its back end. You might eventually witness something useful at some point, tho...
We've Been On a Digital Money Standard For at Least Half a Century January 06, 2023
Just as the Federal Reserve is not a central bank, VISA is not actually a credit card company. What is it about money and payments which leads to so many of these things being labeled as what they aren’t? The answer, quite simply, is in the human ing...
Recessions Hidden Behind Obvious Biases, Outdated Dogma December 16, 2022
Recessions are never unexpected, merely hidden behind obvious biases or buried under layers of outdated dogma. Most of the time, any economy is almost certainly expanding, which distorts our sense of probabilities. Since outright contractions seem ra...
New Urgency In the Marketplace Lacks Meaning to Monetary Officials December 09, 2022
It’s been amazing to watch SOFR do in real-time what its detractors had warned about the entire time. The Federal Reserve through its various means pushed the private market to adopt this thing after having demonized LIBOR for going on a decade. Why?...
Recession Is the Most Obvious Answer To All the Inversion December 02, 2022
As I type, the eurodollar futures curve is exactly 200 bps inverted, solidly Holy Crap territory. US Treasuries aren’t far behind in terms of historical upset, while an unprecedented inversion in the market for Germany’s government debt gets more unp...
So Much Trouble For So Little Yield at the Fed November 18, 2022
Before even getting to the details, it begs the question, why go to all this trouble? So much effort for so little yield, figuratively and literally. For policymakers at the Fed, their job really should be simple, robotic, even. Supply enough money t...
Progress For Jerome Powell, But What About Everyone Else? November 11, 2022
The inability to learn from mistakes, including the most enormous and consequential errors, is the stuff of long-term decay. And while it is nothing new, there’s no comfort in such stark human reality. While we think of scientific progress as a stead...
Jerome Powell Should 'Get It,' But Maybe I'm Being Obtuse November 04, 2022
A wise man once warned that you never bite the hand which feeds you. That man was Jerome Powell. Seriously. Long before he set foot in the Federal Reserve, thirty years ago the future central banker was an actual banker (as a lawyer, still) who then ...
The Real Antagonists Are Those Doing the Same Things Over and Over October 28, 2022
It was the sort of man-to-man appeal no political official wants to make, especially for someone in a position of great authority during exceptionally trying times. Jean-Claude Trichet was the head of the European Central Bank and after having surviv...
QE Amounts to Involuntary Tightening By Central Banks October 21, 2022
Though they never come out and say it, the growing body of evidence shows that what’s called quantitative easing (QE) is more akin to involuntary or inadvertent tightening. The implications are enormous, though still largely unexplored if not entirel...
Tons of Bank Reserves, Little Capacity To Do Anything October 14, 2022
Long before too big to fail became a thing, Citigroup and the Federal Reserve often worked together. Traders at the bank would quite often talk and exchange action advice with their ostensibly regulatory overlords. Chummy, sure, but also a necessary ...
Only a Little of What's Said Is Anywhere Close To Accurate October 07, 2022
Talk about whiplash. Having waited over three decades to restore inflation to its economy, the Bank of Japan is now concerned there’s too much. Maybe way too much. If so, was the twenty-sixth time really the charm? That’s how many QE versions have be...
A Combination of Xi Coincidences Spins Into a Narrative September 30, 2022
This isn’t the first time Xi Jinping was said to have disappeared unexpectedly. And it isn’t the first time Xi was unaccounted for in the weeks leading up to a crucial Communist Party Congress. China’s entire government and political calendar revolve...
Global Demand May Have Hit a Wall When Market Curves Did September 23, 2022
You would have thought him a prosecutor knee-deep rooting out corruption. The man detested the very possibility of anyone scheming under his nose. But Jean-Claude Trichet wasn’t some overtly aggressive DA targeting mafiosos, he was the ECB’s boss det...
The Planet Has a Eurodollar Problem, Not a Dollar Problem September 16, 2022
Hardly any of us know how an automobile actually provides locomotion. Sure, we understand fuel goes in it somewhere, combustion provides the required power, forcing the vehicle forward as efficiently as possible on its circle-shaped tires. That’s all...
The Infatuation With Fanciful Stories of Fascinating Bank Reserves September 09, 2022
Humans invent monsters as a way to cope with their own imperfect knowledge. Norse sailors traveling around the various seas observed a gigantic, long-legged creature and without any way to understand what it was concocted the Kraken. What is supersti...