monetary policy

The liquidity fiction When the Federal Reserve launched its bond buying programs during the Great Financial Crisis over a decade ago, it told the world that it was merely providing liquidity to markets that had needed it. It was acting as…

My British colleague Roger, now in lockdown in the UK, is the one who came up with the title phrase. He said, from an economic, policy and market standpoint, this is the key question to ask. In terms of the policy apparatus now in place, as…

Just after I hit go on the last post, we got a bombshell announcement from the Federal Reserve. And I've responded in real-time on Twitter. So, let me respond more quickly here very briefly too. The Fed is essentially putting a floor on…

With regard to coronavirus, I am still very much focused on the economic fallout. But I do want to circle back around to the themes that inspired my post on market structure vulnerabilities amidst a coronavirus pandemic. What’s inspired me…

Markets in the US are poised for another day of heavy selling as the weekend approaches. And the worry has to be about having open positions over the weekend when any bad news would cause heavy selling pressure at market open on Monday. So,…

I know it's pure folly to predict what the Fed is likely to do on a FOMC meeting by meeting basis. But hear me out. Despite the fact that I see the Fed looking to remain as tight as they can reasonably be in order to save up firepower for…

I want to tie a number of economic and political topics together today as a way of thinking about what the next 18 months in the US will mean. And a lot of it starts with the US domestic economy. Recession watch Over the past several years,…

With the latest Fed and ECB rate policy decisions now behind us, we can start to assess what monetary policy means for the near-term future. I continue to be encouraged by near-term data flow in the US. Nothing in it reads recession.…

I am going to argue here that monetary policy is both less effective than fiscal policy, and that over-reliance on it unnecessarily politicizes monetary policy by putting unelected officials in too prominent an economic role. I would argue…

Sorry for the alarmist post title. But the Fed has completely bottled it. I've been warning for some time that it could go this way. And now, we are in in the endgame. First, the Fed overtightened through 2018. Then, forced at gunpoint by…