Monetary policy can be implemented through outright purchases or sales of securities, which permanently changes the size of the Federal Reserve’s System Open Market Account (SOMA) portfolio.
Bubbles always burst, and the confidence that “this isn’t a bubble” and “the Fed has our back” are counter-indicators.Here we go again: stocks have once again reached nosebleed valuations completely disconnected from reality–in other words a repeat of…
There is no way authorities can limit the coronavirus and restore global growth and debt expansion to December 2019 levels.Authorities around the world are between a rock and a hard place: they need policies that both limit the spread of the coron…
Nasdaq green for the year. What crisis? The Fed’s got this. Only took $2 trillion in balance sheet expansion in four weeks and all is well again. Non. Sense. Indeed I can […]
The Fed’s massive bailout of Primary Dealers and its alphabet soup loan programs for all other big financial players, have now made moral hazard permanent and structural. Why worry about risk when you know that the Fed will always take you off the hook when the shit hits the fan?
How can we know how this will play out? How can we know if these loans can ever be repaid? Will they be repaid through inflation, perhaps hyperinflation? Or will the borrowers simply default if the markets and economy recover too slowly?
Then who will be on the hook for the Fed’s guarantees when the Fed must assume the losses? Who pays? Taxpayers? Depositors? Everyone, again through massive inflation?
Of course, there’s always a chance that everything turns out just fine. The world returns to normal in a few months. The economy bounces back, and all the trillions lent by the Fed gets repaid timely, with no financial price to be paid.
We don’t know, but there will be telltale signs in the weeks ahead that will give us a heads up.
Crazy, Dangerous Things have taken root in policy circles. Traditional norms are being tossed on the compost heap. Deficits don’t matter; the size of central bank balance sheets doesn’t matter; what central banks purchase doesn’t matter; money doesn’t matter.
On March 2, the Bank of Japan leapt into the stock market, Haruhiko Kuroda burnishing his Superman cape as he flew in to rescue the Nikkei. Purchasing a record amount of ETF’s that day, shares in Tokyo surged. It was a clear message, or so everyone thought. Don’t fight the Fed nor the Bank of […]
The New York Fed today released a set of Frequently Asked Questions to address programmatic inquiries about the Primary Market and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities.
Questioning the veracity of Chinese estimates (for anything) has always been something of an amateur sport. For a stat like real GDP, everyone “knows” that it is managed. In a complex world where an economic system for a billion and a half is incomprehensibly unpredictable, there’s really no other way to always hit your government’s […]
Here’s a table of today’s Fed QE purchases. How much bang did the Fed get for its bucks?