Tag Archive: liquidity preferences

US Banks Haven’t Behaved Like This Since 2009

2018-12-14

Total Credit Market Assets 1953 Q1 - 2018 Q1

If there is one thing Ben Bernanke got right, it was this. In 2009 during the worst of the worst monetary crisis in four generations, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman was asked in front of Congress if we all should be worried about zombies. Senator Bob Corker wasn’t talking about the literal undead, rather a scenario much like Japan where the financial system entered a period of sustained agony – leading to the same in the real economy, one lost...

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Deja Vu

2017-09-01

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-01

According to orthodox theory, if interest rates are falling because of term premiums then that equates to stimulus. Term premiums are what economists have invented so as to undertake Fisherian decomposition of interest rates (so that they can try to understand the bond market; as you might guess it doesn’t work any better). It is, they claim, the additional premium a bond investor demands so as to hold a security that much longer (more return to...

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Europe’s Non-linear

2017-06-16

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-06-16

Europe is as we all are. Ben Bernanke wrote a few years ago that his tenure at the Fed must have been a success in his view because the US economy didn’t perform as badly as Europe’s. As usual, this technically true comparison is for any meaningful purpose irrelevant.

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Ending The Fed’s Drug Problem

2017-04-02

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-04-02

GDP Corp Profits After Tax, Jan 2010 - 2017

Gross Domestic Product was revised slightly higher for Q4 2016, which is to say it wasn’t meaningfully different. At 2.05842%, real GDP projects output growing for one quarter close to its projected potential, a less than desirable result. It is fashionable of late to discuss 2% or 2.1% as if these are good numbers consistent with a healthy economy.

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Not Recession, Systemic Rupture – Again

2017-02-25

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-02-25

Pyramid - Total US Gold Stock, January 2017

For the very few in the mainstream of economics who venture further back in history than October 1929, they typically still don’t go much last April 1925. And when they do, it is only to further bash the gold standard for its presumed role in creating the conditions for 1929. The Brits under guidance of Winston Churchill made a grave mistake, one from which gold advocates could never recover given what followed.

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