Has the US Federal Reserve lost control of the narrative? Much as it has tried to sound hawkish, its actual actions into the first half of this year have instead communicated a lack of real resolve, which along with the political retreat on fiscal control with the abandonment of the ‘debt ceiling’, has left equity […]
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Will the US government again be bounced into bailouts following last week’s shock failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and subsequent seizure by the FDIC? The seemingly emphatic answer from ex US Fed chair and now US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is not. “We’re not going to do that again,” she is reported to have […]
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No, I’m not referring to Qanon, but to the US Federal Reserve. Those central banks out there who thought they could get a free ride behind the Fed’s excessive monetary easing for a decade and a half, are now discovering that it came with a price, when the Fed started to pull back some of […]
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Jerome Powell seems eager to talk the talk on tackling inflation, but has yet to walk the walk. According to his 4 May published plan, the initial reduction in the Fed’s balance sheet should have kicked off at approx $47.5bn per month from 1 June, rising to $95bn per month by September. However, in the […]
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It may not feel like it, but it’s over. What that means is that having failed to burn down the warehouse for the insurance, the business owners are now left in an even more precarious position of insurmountable liabilities, assuming of course there is no ‘unexpected’ collapse in life expectancy to bail them out from […]
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The spike in US bond yields has implications for equities, but perhaps not as directly as one might imagine. Yes, long bond yields and particularly TIPS, provide an effective proxy for a risk-free return and therefore the essential anchor for valuing other asset classes, but only from a relative rather than absolute perspective. It may […]
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