Previous 10 | Next 10 |
By Robert Eisenbeis, Ph.D., Vice Chairman & Chief Monetary Economist Beginning in 2018, in a long sequence of actions, the US enacted tariffs on goods from a number of countries besides just China. In some cases the affected countries responded with their own retaliatory tariffs on US ...
By Scott DiMaggio, Gershon Distenfeld From a fraught geopolitical landscape to a global slowdown, the major systemic risks in today's investment landscape are impossible to ignore. We expect such risks to contribute to persistently low and negative yields as well as to bouts of volatility ...
Editor's note: Originally published at tsi-blog.com on January 13, 2020. [This post is an excerpt from a recent TSI commentary] Over the past four months the Fed has added about $400B to its balance sheet. To put this into perspective, since early September, the Fed has expan...
The most problematic part of the markets at present, in my humble opinion, is the lack of yield. Basically, it just ain't nowhere to be found. We are in a "Borrower's Paradise" and a "Fixed-Income Investor's Hell." The real issue now is "Absolute Yield" and not "Relative Yield." Consider that ...
The substantial economic calendar features inflation reports and housing, but also includes Michigan sentiment, the Fed’s Beige Book, and NFIB sentiment survey. We will also get the first earnings reports for the Q4 season. Of late, the calendar has not provided much of a clue to the up...
In our December 31 client letter, we discussed the re-steepening in the US 10-year and 3-month yield spread that has been underway since 2019, as the US Fed began cutting its policy rates once more. An inversion of the 10-year - 3-month spread has preceded each of the last eleven US recessio...
Most debates around Modern Monetary Theory ((MMT)) revolve around the role of operations and the meaning of the "fiscal constraint": what are the limits on fiscal policy? (The focus on this one topic is either the result of this being the most interesting topic, and/or critics not being bother...
Bill Dudley, ex President of the New York Fed, has an excellent Bloomberg editorial on reserves . Reserves are accounts that banks hold at the Fed. The Fed used to pay no interest on these accounts. Accordingly, banks held very small quantities, as little as $10 billion in all, and they man...
Investment-grade corporate bonds had a stellar year, rising more than 17% throughout 2019, based on the total return of Corporate Bond ETF ( LQD ). Investment-grade corporate bonds certainly have a spot in a balanced portfolio, in addition to less risky Treasury bonds. Historically, when ec...
By Breakingviews The death in December of Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and famed inflation fighter, is a reminder that galloping price increases used to be a problem. In recent years, though, inflation has largely gone missing. Its return in 2020 would be an un...