Toward the end of March 2012, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was busy with so many things. It wasn’t supposed to have been that way, not after two “massive” QE’s launched in the wake of the Great “Recession.” After all, V-shaped recoveries provide their own momentum upon which central bankers might piggy-back. In short, there […]
On Tuesday, March 18, 2008, the S&P 500 big cap stock index soared. By the end of closing that day, the index had added 4.2%. Investors were increasingly optimistic that new kinds of “stimulus” which had been hastily introduced over the prior few weeks and months would provide enough of a boost so that the […]
When it’s all over with, I think we’re going to find out we’ve all been unnecessarily harmed by two stochastic models. And in the greatest tragic irony of them all, it was entirely predictable. These statistical constructions can’t predict a thing, subject as they all are to GIGO limitations (Garbage In, Garbage Out). It’s the […]
The Federal Reserve announced the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) on March 23. The intent of this program was to calm the corporate bond market (secondary) then experiencing a massive blowout. Credit spreads of all kinds of corporate securities were exploding, the market in danger of completely shutting down.According to its latest balance sheet […]
There were no Lehman’s or anything like it during March 2020. Does that mean there hadn’t been a crisis? According to some, yes. If you were talking specifically about a bank crisis, then, of course, that would be true. There was no bank crisis last month. It would […]
It used to be that at each quarter’s end the repo rate would rise often quite far. You may recall the end of 2018, following a wave of global liquidations and curve collapsing when the GC rate (UST) skyrocketed to 5.149%, nearly 300 bps above the RRP “floor.” Chalked up to nothing more than 2a7 […]
The Washington Post began this week by noting how the US economy seems to have lost its purported zip just when it needed that vitality the most. Never missing a chance to take a partisan swipe, of course, still there’s quite a lot of truth behind the charge. An actual economic boom produces cushion, enough […]
It’s another day ending in “y”, therefore there must be some new liquidity scheme being announced by the Federal Reserve. For a crisis that many seem confident has been put in the past, the optimists still are going to have to factor that even US central bankers feel they have to keep pulling repo rabbits […]
India like many emerging market countries around the world holds an enormous stockpile of foreign exchange reserves. According to the latest weekly calculation published by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank, that total was a bit less than half a trillion. While it sounds impressive, when the month began the balance […]
It’s one of those crisis-level-of-illiquidity things that if you heard about it in normal times it would make you shake your head in disbelief. During a full-blown meltdown maybe it’s not standard stuff, but given the chaotic conditions it doesn’t seem so preposterous, either. Negative convexity is an otherwise benign phenomenon in fixed income that […]
