monetary policy

If you are a corporate CFO, now is the time to issue bonds because interest rates are very low, courtesy of the Federal Reserve. And companies are doing that from IBM, to J&J and Microsoft. These companies don't need the money; they see…

Highlights The US dollar is retaining its new found firm tone.  Position adjusting ahead of next week’s key events continues to dominate, encouraged by the loss of the dollar’s downside momentum.  Softer Australian CPI (2.8% in…

In our September 28 Salvo, we imagined an opportunity to ask Chairman Bernanke the following question: “What does the Fed do if it expands its balance sheet to $4 trillion or $6 trillion, drives the 10-year yield down to 2% or less, but…

From From Jeremy Grantham's latest quarterly letter: If I were a benevolent dictator, I would strip the Fed of its obligation to worry about the economy and ask it to limit its meddling to attempting to manage inflation.  Better…

In November of 2008, I reported a lawsuit brought by Bloomberg News which requested the Federal Reserve disclose which securities it had accepted on behalf of taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion in loans to banks during the…

Good interview on Bloomberg with David Blanchflower. He thinks the US is going to manipulate its exchange rate by printing a bunch of dollars, leading to currency revulsion and selling of dollars. Meanwhile everyone else is fixated on…

Here's a good discussion of what liquidity traps are from John Hussman. His weekly market commentary begins: "There is the possibility... that after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference is…

Here's an interesting note on quantitative easing and asset allocation from Andy Lees of UBS.  He says: The attached chart gives a simple overlay of the front month 10 year US Treasury future vs the front month S&P future. As…

Blogs in the econoblogosphere are heavy on economic policy advocacy. Ever since the heyday of the US and European housing bubble, the majority of bloggers in the space who are unaffiliated with media sources have been recommending policy…

I didn't make this title up, but it's so clever I wish I had. Andy Xie, the Former Morgan Stanley Asia economist used this as the sub-header in a column in today's Caixin editorial. Xie doesn't buy the G-20 rhetoric that all is fine in the…