Japan

Markets failed to get a lasting boost from change in EZ governments; dollar broadly higher into open. Italy auction met with decent response, but higher yields nonetheless ; change in governments no panacea in EZ. Japan’s preliminary Q3…

Given the poor track record of intervention, unilateral or multilateral, sterilized or unsterilized, there may be no compelling need to understand why the $100 bln intervention is not sticking. All sorts of possible explanations seem partly…

Risk aversion is taking hold again with global stocks broadly lower; dollar firmer against majors. Price action dominated in part by BoJ intervention; on the data front Chicago PMI and Canadian GDP. Norway’s central bank indicated it will…

The BoJ announced today that it will expand its asset purchase programme by JPY5trn (USD66bn), with all the purchases being directed at JGB's. Add that to the GBP75bn (USD120bn) by the BoE, CHF50bn (USD57bn) by the SNB and the EUR341bn…

Gold is up big today and trading like the monetary printing presses are ready to kick into overdrive. We believe the recent Fed speak about QE3, possible BofJ intervention to weaken the yen, and growing expectations that tomorrow’s…

The auxiliary objective of QE by the Fed is to weaken the USD. Herein lies the rub. Quite simply, with the recent announcement by the BOE of another round of QE worth £75 billion, with the ECB now willingly or unwillingly being forced into…

More broadly, the recovery from the March tragedy appears to be running out of steam. Retail sales which surged in the April-June period fell in both July and August and deflation appears to be threatening again. The year-over-year pace of…

On how the expectations theory of interest rates explains why debt-induced depressions are fundamentally deflationary in nature.

Here’s a great chart just released by the International Monetary Fund for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland as well as Japan, the US and the UK. Note that almost half of the US federal government debt is held by the Federal Reserve and the…

Reuters has reported that Bank of China, a dealer in China's foreign exchange market, has stopped doing foreign exchange forwards and swaps with several European banks. Separately, sources say the European banks involved are Societe…