Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

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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Do Rising ‘Global’ Growth Concerns Include An Already *Slowing* US Economy?
Global factors, meaning that the wave of significantly higher deflationary potential (therefore, diminishing inflationary chances which were never good to begin with) in global bond yields the past five months have seemingly focused on troubles brewing outside the US. Overseas turmoil, it was called back in 2015, leaving by default a picture of relative American strength and harmony.
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