Markets

By Marc Chandler The US dollar and Japanese yen are starting the week on a firm note, despite their respective markets closed for holidays. The gains are concentrated against the major European currencies, with the dollar-itself little…

By Marc Chandler The most important thing that ECB President Draghi has said in his prepared remarks was the reluctance to reschedule Greek bond holdings on grounds that would be tantamount to monetary financing.    Really?  Buying the…

I spoke on the panel of a conference that backed into a keynote address by Dennis Gartman. I thought he had a lot of interesting things to say, a lot of which I agreed with. The basic theme of his talk - and this was an investing in…

By Frederick J. Sheehan Editor's Note: Edward Harrison will be writing about the logic others feel support he other side of this trade based on views that Deniis Gartman espoused at an investment conference earlier today.  Frederick J.…

By Sober Look High Yield corporate loans (sometimes also called "institutional", "syndicated", "leveraged", "par", or "bank" loans) continue to be in high demand. And it's not only hedge funds and CLOs (see post) who like this product.…

By Sober Look As an example of how frothy fixed income markets have become, Reynolds did a $3.25 billion HY issuance today. They repaid a great deal of existing debt, but also took half a billion of cash for general purposes - in effect…

By Michael Pettis For the past two years, as regular readers know, I have been bearish on hard commodities. Prices may have dropped substantially from their peaks during this time, but I don’t think the bear market is over. I think we…

Due to the continued high rate of unemployment, the Federal Reserve today took an aggressive policy stance that is being dubbed QE3. The Fed will purchase $40 billion mortgage bonds per month and extend the maturity of its holdings of…

By Sober Look With the GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) forced to shrink their balance sheets (see discussion), the private sector will need to step in. As demand for mortgages increases with the growth of the US population (see…

A friend tipped me off to this BIS paper from 2009. It looks into unconventional monetary policy and the inflationary consequences of adding a huge amount of reserves to the system. The abstract reads as follows:  Abstract The recent…