Tag Archive: Bank of Japan
FX Weekly Preview: ECB and BOJ Meetings Could be Key to Dollar Direction
The US dollar has been marked lower since the middle of last month. It flies in the face strong growth, rising inflation expectations, and greater conviction that the Fed will continue to raise interest rates this year. Moreover, an oft-cited knock on the dollar, the widening current account, may be offset this year by the impact from US corporations repatriating earnings that have been kept offshore.
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Is the BOJ Tapering?
The G3 central banks are in flux. The Federal Reserve is gradually raising rates and allowing the balance sheet to shrink by not fully reinvesting the maturing proceeds. The ECB will purchase half as many bonds in the first nine months of 2018 as it did in the last nine months of 2017.
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The BoJ is sticking to monetary easing
The BoJ remains the last major central bank still firmly committed to large-scale monetary easing.After its Monetary Policy Meeting of December 21, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) announced its intention to keep its current monetary easing programme intact. The BOJ will continue with its “Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing with Yield Curve Control ”, aiming to achieve and overshoot the core inflation target of 2%.
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Bubble Watch: Warning Signs That The Everything Bubble Will Burst in 2018
I believe 2018 will be the year inflation arrives. The reason, as I’ve noted throughout mid-2017, is that multiple Central Banks, particularly the European Central Bank (ECB), Bank of Japan (BoJ) and Swiss National Bank (SNB) have maintained emergency levels of QE and money printing, despite the fact that globally the economy is performing relatively well.
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SNB: It’s A Bonfire Of The Absurdities
This week’s letter will take a look at the growing number of ridiculous, inane, and otherwise nonsensical absurdities that fill the daily economic headlines. I have gone from the occasional smile to scratching my head now and then to “WTF” moments several times a week.
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The Big Reversal: Inflation and Higher Interest Rates Are Coming Our Way
This interaction will spark a runaway feedback loop that will smack asset valuations back to pre-bubble, pre-pyramid scheme levels. According to the conventional economic forecast, interest rates will stay near-zero essentially forever due to slow growth. And since growth is slow, inflation will also remain neutral.
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The Swiss National Bank Now Owns A Record $88 Billion In US Stocks
In the third quarter of 2017, one in which the global economy was supposedly undergoing an unprecedented "coordinated growth spurt", and in which central banks were preparing to unveil their QE tapering intentions, in the case of the ECB, or raising rates outright, at the Fed, what was really taking place was another central bank buying spree meant to boost confidence that things are now back to normal, using "money" freshly printed out of thin...
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Japan Is Booming, Except It’s Not
Japan is hot, really hot. Stocks are up to level not seen since 1996 (Nikkei 225). Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called snap elections in Parliament to secure a supermajority and it worked. Things seem to be sparkling all over the place, with the arrow pointing up: “Hopes for a global economic recovery and US shares’ strength are making fund managers generous on Japanese stocks,” said Chihiro Ohta, general manager of investment research at SMBC Nikko...
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Is This The Best Way To Bet On The Fed Losing Control Of The Bond Market?
Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog, Lately, one of my biggest duds of a call has been for the yield curve to steepen. Sure, I have all sorts of fancy reasons why it should steepen, but reality glares back at me in black and white on my P&L run. Sometimes fighting with the market is an exercise in futility.
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Central Bank Chiefs and Currencies
Market opinion on the next Fed chief is very fluid. BOE Governor Carney sticks to view, but short-sterling curve flattens. New Bank of Italy Governor sought. A second term for Kuroda may be more likely after this weekend election.
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Abe and BOJ
BOJ is unlikely to change policy. A snap election suggests continuity of policy. US 10-year yield remains one of most important drivers of the exchange rate.
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Fed’s Asset Bubbles Now At The Mercy Of The Rest Of The World’s Central Bankers
"Like watching paint dry," is how The Fed describes the beginning of the end of its experiment with massively inflating its balance sheet to save the world. As former fund manager Richard Breslow notes, however, Yellen's decision today means the risk-suppression boot is on the other foot (or feet) of The SNB, The ECB, and The BoJ; as he writes, "have no fear, The SNB knows what it's doing."
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FX Weekly Preview: FOMC Highlights Big Week
The days ahead are historic. By all reckoning, Merkel will be German Chancellor for a fourth consecutive term. Many observers expect the election to usher in a new era of German-French coordination to continue the European project post-Brexit and in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis.
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Forget Tulips & Bitcoin – Here’s The Real Bubble
While the broader market for Swiss stocks has risen modestly this year, one 'entity' has outperformed its peers by such a staggering margin, it has left bamboozled market experts struggling for an explanation. And that company is…the Swiss National Bank. The price of a share in Swiss National Bank in August rose above 3,000 francs ($3,143) for the first time, more than double the level of a year ago, and up 50% since mid-July, as the Financial...
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Yanking the Bank of Japan’s Chain
Based on the simple reflection that arithmetic is more than just an abstraction, we offer a modest observation. The social safety nets of industrialized economies, including the United States, have frayed at the edges. Soon the safety net’s fabric will snap. This recognition is not an opinion. Rather, it’s a matter of basic arithmetic. The economy cannot sustain the government obligations that have been piled up upon it over the last 70 years.
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“Mystery” Central Bank Buyer Revealed: SNB Now Owns A Record $84 Billion In US Stocks
In the second quarter of the year, one in which unlike in Q1 fund flows showed a persistent and perplexing outflow from US stocks and into European and Emerging Markets, a trading desk rumor emerged that even as institutional traders dumped stocks and retail investors piled into ETFs, a "mystery" central bank was quietly bidding up risk assets by aggressively buying stocks.
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SNB Balance Sheet, Markets and Economy: As Good As It Gets?
Late 2014/early 2015 will perhaps be the closest to a real recovery from the Great “Recession” we shall see in this cycle. Q1 2015 marked the peak year over year growth rate of GDP in this recovery at 3.76%. That rate compares quite unfavorably with even the feeble post dot com crash recovery high of 4.41% in Q1 2004.
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