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By Win Thin It’s all about monetary tightening in EM today. PBOC hiked reserve requirements another 50 bp today, effective January 20, and has hiked a total here of 350 bp since starting in January 2010. This comes after the Christmas…

This from today's Fed Beige Book survey: Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts suggest that economic activity continued to expand moderately from November through December. Conditions were said to be improving in the Boston,…

By Michael Pettis This year to everyone’s surprise the PBoC failed to announce 2011’s lending quota. Instead it announced a series of new polices aimed at monitoring the banks. According to an article in Thursday’s People’s Daily: The…

by Annaly Capital Management An interesting recent piece by Reuven Glick and Kevin J. Lansing of the San Francisco Fed looks to explain changes in the savings rate over time. On an aggregate level, the authors point out that the savings…

by Michael Pettis For the past two months there have been very strong rumors in the markets that next year’s new lending quota was going to be set somewhere between RMB 6.5 trillion and RMB 7.0 trillion.  For comparison’s sake, total…

Most of the headlines you’ll see related to the Federal Reserve’s Z.1 Flow of Funds report are focused on the change in household net worth. In the 3rd quarter 2010 report, released yesterday, the change was a positive one: household net…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009). To the Financial Times, October 7, 2010: Dear Sirs, It is…

Note the reserve amounts in this post have been amended to reflect the $200 billion increase instead of the $20 billion originally cited. There are four developments in China to note today. First, China reported that its reserves jumped…

Asha Bangalore of Northern Trust writes: Recent data indicate bank credit has increased in July and August (chart 2A), while partial September data suggest another monthly gain.  This is a positive and noteworthy development, but…

Earlier today, Japan's second largest consumer lender, Takefuji sought legal protection of bankruptcy. The source of its woes, and apparently others in that space, is that the borrowers were overcharged interest. Japan's regulator says that…