The Fed Is Overindebted, Isn’t It?

2023-05-11

An ongoing debate concerns the plunge in the four-week Treasury note yield in relation to the three-month Treasury yield. At least one tweeter claims it’s all about the coming debt ceiling showdown with the difference in rates (3.145 percent versus 5.070 percent) reflecting the risk of having liquidity tied up within three months as the debt ceiling exercise is run through DC sausage making.
On the other side is Eurodollar University’s Jeffrey Snider who tweeted in response, “The behavior of bills today, esp. 4w[eek], was way too like April 2008 not debt ceiling. Just massive demand for these things to the point that it’s 2008-style below other money alternatives. This ain’t debt ceiling rather pure collateral run.”
Snider tweeting again:
Let’s put this to rest right now: bills and debt

2023-05-10

ATO’s post–Cold War history is that of an organization far past its “sell-by” date. Desperate for a mission after the end of the Warsaw Pact, NATO in the late 1990s decided that it would become the muscle behind the militarization of “human rights” under the Clinton Administration.
Gone was the “threat of global communism” which was used to justify NATO’s 40-year run, so NATO re-imagined itself as a band of armed Atlanticist superheroes. Wherever there was an “injustice” (as defined by Washington’s neocons), NATO was ready with guns and bombs.
The US military-industrial complex could not have been happier. All the Beltway think tanks they lavishly fund finally hit on a sure winner to keep the money pipeline flowing. It was always about money, not security.
The test run for NATO as human

2023-05-04

Money first originated through the voluntary exchange of commodities, such as gold and silver, in order to eliminate the inefficiencies of barter.
As Austrian school of economics founder Carl Menger explained:
Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.
However, governments quickly learned that they could gain enormous wealth and power by taking control of money. Ludwig von Mises detailed in his magnum opus Human Action how this control has harmed human progress and noted that “For two hundred years the governments have interfered

2023-02-16

The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released new price inflation data today, and according to the report, price inflation during the month decelerated slightly, coming in at the lowest year-over-year increase in sixteen months.