Clik here to view.
Liquidity And Bubbles As Systems Theory; Or Inevitability
I have to thank my colleague Joe Calhoun for passing alone a very topical article written by Nassim Taleb and Gregory Treverton in Foreign Affairs. Taleb is, of course, well-known for his “black swan”,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Global Trade Is Exactly That
In March 2009, only two days after the exact bottom in US stocks, Alan Greenspan took the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare, declaratively, that the Fed was not to blame for the catastrophe....
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Much Smaller Is The Economy Now?
The dissection of the economy as it exists right now is usually limited to a narrow cross section of only GDP and the unemployment rate. As long as both are moving in the “right” direction, even if...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rational Expectations or Bubbles
The FOMC has been talking, so we hear, about changing “forward guidance” to indicate a potential rate hike sooner rather than later. They had already changed the basis of “forward guidance” back in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cliffs
So far the heavy buying after yesterday’s FOMC admission has held on the eurodollar curve. Most of the contracts along the curve have only given back a few bps after the 15-25 bps moves everywhere...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Definitive Monetary Policy Statement
To preserve any idea that the US is not heading into recession, the FOMC is now wholly reliant on statistical processes within the BEA’s use of the Census Bureau’s updated ARIMA-X13 modeling system. It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Whose Recovery Is It Anyway?
You may have heard recently about the Transportation Safety Administration’s record for safety measures in airline transportation. The task with which the government agency is charged has become a bit...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Looking For The Next One; Part 1, Orderly Or Not?
I generally remain noncommittal about giving specific predictions about the future because there is simply no way toward predilection. We can think about probabilities as a guide for analysis,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Looking For The Next One; Part 2, Finding Risk Rather Easily
Part 1 is here, Orderly or Not (short version: not). Also noted yesterday, the Fed sees no risks of bubble trouble because they are looking at it all from the 2008 perspective. That is completely...
View ArticleClik here to view.
There’s Something Wrong With The World Today and It’s 1995
There weren’t any surprises in the “final” GDP update for Q1. Going back to -0.2%, the same interpretations still apply, especially and including the inventory contribution. Economists and policymakers...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Happens When Everything That Was Supposed To Doesn’t
Last week, the CBO updated some of its calculations and methods for estimating the effects of “automatic stabilizers” on the deficit. These are Keynesian concepts whereby the government increases...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Politics of Wages
Last week, the Economist published an article ostensibly about the politics of wages. Earned income has become a populist football, apparently, with both political parties jockeying to take the most...
View ArticleThere Are No New Banks; Dodd-Frank Hits Five
Today is the fifth anniversary of Dodd-Frank, the erstwhile government response to assure that the Panic of 2008 does not repeat. It was an ill-advised task to begin with as the panic itself took care...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Agitating For A More Informed Inflation
There are numerous problems created by asset bubbles and many more as a result of a series of them. The financial system becomes highly destabilized, especially as authorities and policymaking bodies...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Unnatural Saturation of Counterproductive ‘Solutions’
The minimum wage is not what is commonly referred, as is being proven again as parts of the US experiment directly with this boundary. In New York, fast food workers have been given a $15 per hour...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Economists Try To Find ‘Missing’ GDP Rather Than The Lost Economy
With the advance report on GDP for Q2 set to be released this week, economists are working hard to explain why it doesn’t represent the utopian delivery that they swear had already occurred via...
View ArticleClik here to view.
If It Takes 3 Years For The 2012 Slowdown To Hit GDP…
According to the latest GDP revisions I may have been off in my projection of where the recession began. I wrote in 2013 that if pressed I would name October 2012 as the start of the recession. There...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Continued State of Denial
The San Francisco Fed just published a study in its Economic Letter that purports both that the housing bubble was exogenous and that the Fed would have had to crash the economy to a much greater...
View ArticleClik here to view.
US/Global Trade Too Suggests Supercycle or Permanent Shrinkage
There was absolutely nothing good about the most recent trade data for June. Even what looked like an improvement really wasn’t, suggesting, strongly, that conditions in the global economy are still...
View ArticleClik here to view.
BoJ Shows Explicitly How Shrinking Is Done
With base comparisons out of the way moving past the calendar months of Japan’s tax change last year, the continuing recession re-emerges. Real wages fell 2.9% year-over-year in June despite...
View Article
