The Great Recession Blog

The Fed finally begun its cautious taper and the market did not immediately self-destruct… but the consequences of 14 years of central bank experimentation, regulatory overkill and the ‘processification’ of markets will have consequences… they may be bleak…. When bond markets sneeze… equity markets can end up on ventilators, dragging confidence down in their wake. Bill […]

The last time I included a particular indicator of where temporary inflation and permanent inflation are headed, the indicator had risen in rather threatening manner to look like this:

As I’ve written about extensively, we know the Federal Reserve has painted itself into a corner where it is now pressured to start tapering its quantitative easing earlier than it had been indicating. Now we are seeing signs that the bond market isn’t liking the news out of the last FOMC meeting, which hinted strongly […]

The bond market is crazy weird right now. Inflation is soaring, and bond yields, which are supposed to price in inflation, are falling through the floor, causing many experts to scratch their heads as they try to figure out what on earth to make of it all:

This past week we got to observe Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the US stock market and the US bond market do everything I said they would do in their complicated shuffle of ships-and-icebergs: “I’m sure many helium-headed stock investors believe the lilly-livered Fed will turn tail and run from its goal of letting inflation […]

The major knock-on effects of the COVID shutdown are now starting to stack against each other, pushing city centers into the dust. Here are some of the big moves that are as characteristic of the US as they are of the world overall.

In one of my recent Patron Posts, I stated there was virtually no chance the Federal Reserve would be lowering interest rates below the zero bound. In spite of the massive economic damage we’ve seen from the coronavirus shutdown, that has so far remained true. The Fed has continued to say they don’t believe they […]

Bank of America says it is dangerous to ignore the stock market, but a longer tradition says the bond market is the wiser of the two, and it is dangerous to ignore the bond market. Bank of America dreams corporate cash could roll into stocks.

Ron Insana, whom I’ve always thought was well named due to the funny way his brain works and the way he smiles even when nothing is happening, has just melded minds with Kudlow & Cramer to support a coronavirus war bond: My colleague, Jim Cramer, made a very interesting recommendation Monday morning, calling on the U.S. Treasury […]

The bust is on! Not only is the stock market crashing like never seen before (Dow down 3,000 points today!), but there are now deeply distressing breaks in the bond market. These staggering responses to Fed actions run counter to what is expected; but people are so focused on stocks, the are missing the more […]

Back in the oil-embargo recession of the early 70s when Boeing was Seattle’s economy and was laying off thousands of Seattleites, a billboard on the edge of town by Sea-Tac Airport read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn the lights out?” (Boeing had gone from 100,800 employees in 1967 to 38,690 in 1971.)

This little monster that feeds beneath the surface of global banking at its core briefly raised one ugly eye out of the water as 2018 turned into 2019. I wrote back then that the interest spike we saw in the kind of overnight interbank lending known as repurchase agreements (repos) was just the foreshock of […]