The final quarter is often one of instant reinforcement of both winners and losers. How will it go this time, once the Fed has thrown the knucklebones? Will Evergrande’s partly politically-inspired demise be smoothly handled – if only in a manner that satisfies Xi’s insatiable lust for power? Will the Vaccine Wars further undermine social harmony and hinder economic progress? How will the burgeoning energy crisis – bastard child of misguided climate polcies – play out as winter approaches? All will be revealed in due course.
Tag Archives: Central Banks
Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon, signed Executive Order 11615 and with it sundered the last remaining links between the US dollar and gold. Half a century on and many of the lessons of that sorry episode have been sadly forgotten while central banks now hold themselves accountable to no standard save that of their own swelling hubris. Can we really avoid the evils of inflation in such a world?
Markets seem happy for now to focus on the carrot of a vaccine while ignoring the stick of the further severe restrictions to life and liberty being implemented while we await its delivery. Whether or not it offers a release from bondage, the state’s rediscovered taste for authoritarianism will, however, take some good time to dispel, while its corollary – the move toward taking an ever greater role amid the wreckage of the private economy – is being pursued with relish. Whatever the sloganizing, this is very unlikely to Build anything Back Better – only dearer and scarcer.
This essay attempts a review of the economics – and the prevailing economic thinking – which have brought us to our present pass of high-leverage and heavy debt-dependence. It helps set the backdrop for an in-depth look at markets which will follow shortly…
While stocks have generally tended to offer better returns than Treasuries, it has not all been plain sailing for equity investors. Intriguingly, the last 50 years’ ups and downs share more than a few similarities with the first half of the last century. Could that uncanny resemblance continue to hold henceforward?
There are those who can display a solid grasp of the oft–misunderstood mechanics of credit and money generation by banks and who are also well aware of the episodes of endemic mistakes this entrains in in our system. Yet, perhaps because they possess a certain ideological bent, many such commentators cannot seem to steel themselves […]
In the Q&A which followed the latest Federal Reserve exercise in ostrich imitation, Janet Yellen offered up this giant hostage to fortune, if only in the spirit of she-would-say-that-wouldn’t-she: ‘Overall, I would say that the threats to financial stability I would characterize, at this point, as moderate. In general, I would not say that asset valuations […]
I was recently flattered to be asked how I envisaged the dreaded ‘helicopter money’ working if it were not to simply add further to commercial banks’ already crippling mass of deadweight liabilities and assets, given that not only would printing it up in physical form be tortuous but that cash itself is only one conveniently […]
As we have laid out in some detail in our professional work, it is clear that Chinese banks have entirely lost their inhibitions about creating money these past twelve months. It is equally clear that once such money is called into existence, someone must be caught in the act of holding it when a balance sheet snapshot […]
Ah, Brexit! What is there left to say that not already been said, most of it either out of folly or falsehood? As regards the overall political backdrop to this lightning bolt of mass discontent, the only thing that is clear is that there is no clarity—neither within Britain nor without. If, as the Good Book […]
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