monetary policy

The Bank of England has cut interest rates and started a quantitative easing program that includes both government and corporate bonds. This approach was enough to send the pound Sterling down to $1.31 and 10-year gilt rates to a record low…

UK Chancellor Osborne has now abandoned his 2020 budget surplus target. Combine this with the dovish statements by Bank of England governor Mark Carney yesterday and you can see some serious policy changes in play to minimize the near-term…

I've been following the Fed's forward guidance recently and, frankly, I find it confused. On the one hand, it was a clear mistake to have raised rates in December. We see this now in retrospect due to the tightening of financial conditions…

Perhaps we are misreading the Fed’s intentions going forward because multiple Fed officials are signaling the Fed’s intention to raise interest rates multiple times in 2016 and 2017. And while rate hikes are usually considered tightening,…

The extended period of low growth following the Global Crisis was denoted the ‘New Normal’ by some. This column argues that the period is still ongoing, and would be more usefully described as the ‘New Abnormal’. Far from being an…

Since the Global Crisis, interest rates in many advanced economies have been low and, in many cases, are expected to remain low for some time. Low interest rates help economies recover and can enhance banks’ balance sheets and performance,…

The primacy of monetary policy continues unabated as central banks go further and further down the rat hole of increasingly desperate measures to boost demand. First, it was quantitative easing. Now, the latest scheme is negative interest…

The latest jobs report came in at 160,000 jobs added to US non-farm payrolls. As this number was below expectations, it effectively sidelines the Fed in June. And given we are in an election year, the chances of two rate hikes occurring are…

Technological advancement in a world of high private debt means a substitution of capital for labor without big increases in demand. It is a recipe for low or negative growth. Add in demographic challenges in many countries and you have a…

When one thinks about why the US has outperformed, a lot of the analysis is destined to focus on fiscal and monetary policy. And while I think that’s an important thought process to go through, I believe that bank recapitalization and shale…