Recent Commentaries
So, what do you think of the Warsh nomination?
The highly circuitous journey toward a Fed chair nomination has finally come to an end. Now the tedious process of dissecting every past sound bite, speech, op-ed, and media appearance from Kevin Warsh will be keeping the Fed watchers extra busy in the weeks and...
A Rate Check & A Rick Check
Last Friday afternoon, the US Treasury directed the open market desk at the NYFED to conduct a "rate check" in USDJPY. And to be sure, a rate check has historically been the precursor to direct FX market intervention. Now, the last time we saw an intervention in...
A refresher on large scale asset purchases
I received an unusual amount of feedback from my note from last Friday on the $200b mortgage purchase announcement. Many folks pushed back on the notion that these large-scale asset purchases, to be executed by the GSEs, were yet another version of QE. They argued...