quantitative easing

For all practical purposes the Fed has done it all. And yet unemployment remains at depression levels of over 9% (and over 16% the way it used to be calculated not long ago) and the only thing keeping what’s called ‘inflation’ over 1% is a…

Switzerland reports its October consumer prices on Monday. This could be important. The Swiss National Bank's decision to cap the franc took place on the same day that the August CPI was reported (Sept 6). It showed a 0.3%…

The bulls assert that the market is already discounting major risk and is reflecting widespread fear that may prove unfounded. That might be true if the market had collapsed as in 2000-2002 or 2008-2009. However, the current market is more…

Harvard Economist Kenneth Rogoff has a post up at Project Syndicate which does a good job in laying out the conundrum that Europe faces in the sovereign debt crisis. He theme is exchange rates and currency revulsion. But the underlying…

The Federal Reserve holds a two day meeting that concludes near midday tomorrow. It will likely be the first meeting in a while where there is not change in the composition or size of the balance sheet and no fresh initiatives, like cutting…

Operation Twist didn't work in Russia, India or Brazil and it's not working in the US.

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…

Last November, in anticipation of QE2, I wrote a post called “How Quantitative Easing and Permanent Zero are Toxic To Bank Net Interest Margins”. The gist of the post was that if the ‘extended period’ for low rates was too long, net…

The Bank of England, which has a penchant for surprising the market, chose not to wait for the quarterly inflation report to provide cover, and announce GBP75 bln additional bond purchases over the next four months. We forecast sterling to…