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Hugh Hendry and David Einhorn at the Buttonwood Gathering
Spend some time over the weekend listening to Hugh Hendry and David Einhorn, who were participating in the Economist’s Buttonwood Gathering this week. Nice to hear from some non-cheerleaders. Smart...
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Congrats, Mr. President. Let’s Get to Work!
Congratulations to the President on his reelection. Time to move on and get to work. First up is a short-term strategy to avoid the fiscal cliff. Next is appointing a new Secretary of Treasury to...
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Ballooning of Central Bank Balance Sheets
Interesting data and charts from the IMF on the ballooning of central bank balance sheets. Since August 2007, the Fed’s balance sheet has increased by 221 percent, mainly through the purchase of...
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Cue FED
Here’s some interesting data the Fed is surely looking at. The monetary base has been flat lining since the end of QE2 – i.e., the balance sheet growth of the Federal Reserve has not been above...
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Chart of the Day: Operation Twisted Yield Curve
Interesting chart from Bloomberg on how the Fed’s treasury holdings have changed under operation twist, or more formally, the Maturity Extension Program and Reinvestment Policy. After the end of the...
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The Fed on Food Stamps
Wow! The food stamp program is now equivalent to 14 percent of all U.S. grocery store sales. Though the Fed indirectly finances the food stamp program with its purchase of treasury securities — $45...
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Bank of Japan Eases
Bank of Japan announced this morning it would increase its Asset Purchase Program by 10 trillion yen, from 91 trillion to 101 trillion yen. They split evenly, buying 5 trillion in T-Bills and 5...
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Repressed Fear
This nice chart comes to us from the Leuthold Group via Bloomberg. It illustrates that market fear or risk aversion is at its lowest levels since the 1980′s! Yikes! The Leuthold Group constructs...
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VIX Has Largest Weekly Down Move Since Inception
The CBOE has a nice piece out noting this week’s 39.1 percent collapse in the VIX was the largest weekly percent down move since the index was launched in January 1990. The week also saw record volume...
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Excess Reserves Declining
Keep this one on your radar. Excess reserves of depository institutions are beginning to decline, down $183 billion, or 11.3 percent, from their peak in November 2011 This is where much of the...
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Tweet of the Day: Slouching Toward Weimar
Clay Aiken, U.S. musician and American Idol, tweets: Dumb question: If the Treasury can mint $1 trillion coin to spend on debt, why cant it mint a $16 trillion coin & pay off the debt entirely?—...
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Would A Trader Buy This Chart?
Note the bottoming of the M1 money multiplier after its long secular decline. The multiplier is effectively the ratio of money created by the banking system (deposits) vs. money created by the central...
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Most Overbought and Oversold Markets
Asia x/Japan equities began to to work off overbought conditions. Japan’s Nikkei continues to reprice higher on weaker yen. Italy’s MIB and Spain’s IBEX experiencing the “positive contagion“ from...
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Federal Reserve Assets Top $3 Trillion
The Fed’s balance sheet just topped $3 trillion for the first time ever according to the Wall Street Journal, The U.S. Federal Reserve‘s balance sheet topped $3 trillion for the first time as the...
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The Fed and Credit Rationing
John Taylor’s piece in the WSJ yesterday noted, So if investors are told by the Fed that the short-term rate is going to be close to zero in the future, then they will bid down the yield on the...
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Euro slumps on ECB Draghi’s comments
“Exchange rate is not a policy target, but it is important for growth…” – Mario Draghi (click here if video is not observable)
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Beggar Thy Neighbor’s Stock Market
Interesting chart which we suspected and all knew that, thus far, the 2013 macro equity trade x/ U.S. has been to be long those markets where the home currency is weakening against the dollar. The red...
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Stanley Fischer to Replace Bernanke?
The Washington Post thinks it is a possibility. Dylan Matthews’ excellent piece – run don’t walk to read — speculates on the former: 1) MIT/University of Chicago professor; 2) Ben Bernanke Ph.D....
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Weekend Lecture: Economics of Abenomics
The Peterson Institute held a high-level discussion of the economic policy initiatives of Japan’s new government, or Abenomics, on February 15, 2013. This timely event took place just ahead of Prime...
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