The basics of the BROMP (Boehner - Reid - Obama - McConnell - Pelosi) plan are out and spoos seem pretty happy!! Last week the market fell for this foolish idea that a debt default could actually be engineered in DC. Of course it was a scare tactic with no teeth....
Bob Barro, a highly distinguished Harvard economist, and more importantly one of my graduate macro professors at the University of Rochester back in the 80s, has always been one of the great skeptics of Keynesian economics - specifically Keynesian counter cyclical...
It appears that a US government shutdown is coming closer to reality - again. Since 1976 there have been 17 - with the 1995/96 shutdown of 21 days the longest in modern history. If on August 2nd there is no budget deal, then we should see number 18. Did financial...
It was a little over 1 year ago that Le TARP was announced. It soothed beaten European markets for a short time before its core operating facility - the EFSF - was stripped of the bulk of its advertised power to act directly in markets by a German led contingent of...
Catchy title huh? Of course I don't have the plan. But the rumor mill is swirling with possibilities - Greek haircuts, bank taxes, ECB accepting defaulted bonds, EFSF secondary buying, EFSF loans etc. etc. Expectations are high and we will need to see something fairly...
First of all a number of clients picked up on a rather large typo in my commentary from a few hours ago. The last sentence read - "The Germans will not destroy EMU but there will be some countries that may make it through to the end." It should have read - "The...
A perfect speech from Ben!!! I would have titled it "The semi-annual affirmation of the Bernanke Put to the Congress" or maybe better and more simply put "Buy spoos, I got your back". I liked this except on how the Fed describes QE policies - "by removing substantial...
When 2 trillion of market cap moves into a complete liquidity vacuum, it’s a problem. The explanations for the recent Italian debt price moves seem to be all over the map. Domestics exiting, foreign central bank selling and then of course foreign central bank buying...
The post payroll price action has been less eventful than I would have thought given the size of the miss. The mortgage and corporate credit markets are only a touch softer and equities are down about 1% - all certainly within one standard dev for a payroll day! The...
Everything about that report stinks. Household survey showed -445k employed and +173 unemployed with the participation rate falling. Headline payrolls very soft at +18k with private payrolls only +57k. And the U6 rate went up to 16.2 from 15.8! A very bad report and...
Everything about that report stinks. Household survey showed -445k employed and +173 unemployed with the participation rate falling. Headline payrolls very soft at +18k with private payrolls only +57k. And the U6 rate went up to 16.2 from 15.8! A very bad report and the market was caught off side with the Obama press conference […]
