quantitative easing

This isn’t a theme post. It is more like the posts I now do on Friday with a bunch of different ideas on important topics. But the underlying theme that interconnects the ideas is a deflationary-style slowdown. First, in Europe, the CPI is…

By Marc Chandler There seems to be a stepped effort by ECB officials to talk the euro down. The process began with Draghi last week indicated that the euro has become a more salient factor as it poses a deflationary risk and threatens the…

So finally we get to see what the Yellen Fed is all about. And it is not as dovish as people thought it would be.While the noises Yellen made concerning the jobs market came across as dovish, behind the scenes a more hawkish tone has…

By Marc Chandler There has been sharp rise in US interest rates and the dollar in the immediate response to the Federal Reserve's statement. The key it seemed was the expectation that federal funds would be at 1% at the end of next year.…

In trying to assess the trajectory of the US economy, one is struck by the recent divergence between the manufacturing and the services sectors. Most analysts blame the weakness in the service sector and the resulting softness in the labor…

By Marc Chandler A discussion of what the ECB is likely to do at Thursday's policy meeting requires an appreciation of its challenges. There are four challenges that the ECB faces in nursing the "weak, fragile and uneven" recovery, as…

The ECB continues to argue that there is no deflation risk in the Eurozone though many people dispute this. The ECB must act, and politicians in the Eurozone must allow it to do so. Treaties be damned.

The aim of the above header is to link two names in people’s minds, both of them Italian: Mario Draghi and Matteo Renzi. Naturally the idea is not original, the FT’s Peter Spiegel recently published an entire blog post (Does Renzi owe his…

As high income economies improve and the financial sectors stabilize, central bankers understandably and rightly, want to move away from the unorthodox policies that were necessary to avoid an even larger collapse and more suffering.

The supply of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) continues to fall behind the potential demand - even with the Fed's taper in place. New issuance has steadily declined over the past year, with the Fed becoming an increasingly larger…