Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

Afghanistan: how the Taliban weakened America | The Economist

The Taliban’s swift return to power in Afghanistan has shocked the world and humiliated America. What effect will this have on the international standing of the US and on global security? Our experts answer your questions. Further content: Find more of our coverage on Asia: https://econ.st/3srkBjq Read more about the Taliban’s terrifying triumph in Afghanistan:https://econ.st/3stoa91 Joe Biden is shirking responsibility for Afghanistan:...

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Taper *Without* Tantrum

Whomever actually coined the term “taper”, using it in the context of Federal Reserve QE for the first time, it wasn’t actually Ben Bernanke. On May 22, 2013, the central bank’s Chairman sat in front of Congressman Kevin Brady and used the phrase “step down in our pace of purchases.” No good, at least from the perspective of a media-driven need for a snappy one-word summary.

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Why the Global Economy Is Unraveling

Global supply chain logjams and global credit/financial crises aren't bugs, they're intrinsic features of Neoliberalism's fully financialized global economy. To understand why the global economy is unraveling, we have to look past the headlines to the primary dynamic of globalization: Neoliberalism, the ideological orthodoxy which holds that introducing market dynamics to sectors that were closed to global markets generates prosperity for all.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Happy Anniversary!

Today is the 50th anniversary of the “Nixon shock”, the day President Richard Nixon closed the gold window and ended the post-WWII Bretton Woods currency agreement. That agreement, largely a product of John Maynard Keynes, pegged the dollar to gold and most other currencies to the dollar.

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Should covid-19 vaccines be mandatory?

Most governments recognise that vaccination is the fastest way out of the pandemic, but in many places hesitancy is hindering the roll-out. Should employers—or even governments—force people to have the vaccine? We answer your questions. Read more of our covid-19 coverage: https://econ.st/37AvUfF Listen to “The Jab” podcast from Economist Radio: https://econ.st/3CJKBv8 Listen to our podcast about vaccine incentives: https://econ.st/2XmrDL9 How...

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CPI’s At Fives Yet Treasury Auctions

A momentous day, for sure, but one lost in what would turn out to be a seemingly endless sea of them. October 8, 2008, right in the thick of the world’s first global financial crisis (how could it have been global, surely not subprime mortgages?) the Federal Reserve took center stage; or tried to.

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Dear Fed: Are You Insane?

So sorry, America, but your central bank is certifiably insane, and it's not going to magically work out. History definitively shows that speculative bubbles always pop--always. Every speculative bubble mania, regardless of its supposed uniqueness--"it's different this time"--pops.

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A Real Example Of Price Imbalance

It’s not just the trade data from individual countries. Take the WTO’s estimates which are derived from exports and imports going into or out of nearly all of them. These figures show that for all that recovery glory being printed up out of Uncle Sam’s checkbook, the American West Coast might be the only place where we can find anything resembling Warren Buffett’s red-hot claim.

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The Two Big Anniversaries of August: The Lost Decade (plus) Of The ‘Fiat’ Half Century

As my esteemed podcast co-host Emil Kalinowski has already mentioned (recurrently), we have, this year, two major anniversaries during these dog days of summer circled on our calendar. Today is, obviously, August 9 and for anyone the slightest familiar with the eurodollar story, that date is seared into their consciousness for as long as it will take to rebuild from the ashes created by the monetary fire lit that day. It has been, sadly, fourteen...

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The End of Global Tourism?

Viewed as a complex non-linear system, the pandemic varinants can only be controlled by drastically pruning the physical connections between disparate global groups, which means effectively ending the unrestricted flow of individuals around the planet.

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Weekly Market Pulse: What Is Today’s New Normal?

Remember “The New Normal”? Back in 2009, Bill Gross, the old bond king before Gundlach came along, penned a market commentary called “On the Course to a New Normal” which he said would be: “a period of time in which economies grow very slowly as opposed to growing like weeds, the way children do; in which profits are relatively static; in which the government plays a significant role in terms of deficits and reregulation and control of the...

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Should we be worried about technology? | The Economist

The covid-19 pandemic has reinforced humanity’s dependence on modern tech, but the same tools that enable remote working are also being used to spread disinformation and perpetuate cybercrime. Ambivalence towards technology is nothing new. Read more of our coverage of Science & technology: https://econ.st/3CdkVa5 See our Technology Quarterlies: https://econ.st/3jldAN6 Why is pessimism about the impact of technology nothing new?...

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While the Herd Slumbers, Risk Is Rocketing Higher

This wholesale transfer of risk from elites to the workers is finally becoming consequential as wealth / income / security inequality is reaching extremes that are destabilizing society and the economy.

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Sophistry Dressed (as) Reallocation

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: About US$275 billion (about SDR 193 billion) of the new allocation will go to emerging markets and developing countries, including low-income countries.

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What is net zero? | The Economist

More than 50 countries around the world have pledged to become net zero. But what does net zero actually mean—and is it achievable? Find The Economist’s most recent coverage on climate change: https://econ.st/3zCt2uW Sign up to The Economist’s daily newsletter to keep up to date with our latest stories: https://econ.st/3gJBH8D Why do climate pledges fall short?: https://econ.st/3eVCYaI What are nationally determined contributions to curb...

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The Moment Wall Street Has Been Waiting For: Retail Is All In

The ideal bagholder is one who adds more on every downturn (buy the dip) and who refuses to sell (diamond hands), holding on for the inevitable Fed-fueled rally to new highs. Old hands on Wall Street have been wary of being bearish for one reason, and no, it's not the Federal Reserve: the old hands have been waiting for retail--the individual investor-- to go all-in stocks. After 13 long years, this moment has finally arrived: retail is...

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Golden Collateral Checking

Searching for clues or even small collateral indications, you can’t leave out the gold market. We’ve been on the lookout for scarcity primarily via the T-bill market, and that’s a good place to start, yet looking back to last March the relationship between bills and bullion was uniquely strong. It’s therefore a persuasive pattern if or when it turns up again.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Buy The Dip, If You Can

If you were waiting for a correction in stock prices to put some money to work, you got your chance last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly 1000 points at the low Monday and closed down 725, a loss of a little over 2%. The S&P 500 did a little better but closed down 1.5%.

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America Is a Moral Cesspool, and Student Loans Prove It

If America somehow managed to educate millions of college students without burdening them with $2 trillion in debt in 1993, why is it now "impossible" to do so, even as America's wealth and gross national product (GDP) have both rocketed higher over the past 27 years?

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Eurodollar University’s Making Sense; Episode 89, Part 2: Let’s Crack China’s RRR Code

89.2 China Warns World of (Next?) Dollar Disorder. The People’s Bank of China lowers its bank Required Reserve Ratio to get money into a slowing economy. A lowered RRR means that there aren’t enough (euro)dollars flowing into China. Why? Because there aren’t enough (euro)dollars in the world. A lower RRR is a warning for the whole world.

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