I want to talk a bit about perceived policymaker ineptitude today in the wake of the OPEC and ECB meetings, both held in Vienna. First, let’s do the headlines: we got nothing in the way of an agreement out of OPEC and no policy change from Draghi. To be sure, both of those outcomes (or
On Friday, I outlined how Japan’s FX Catch-22 could end up weighing on US equities. Make no mistake, it’s an important dynamic to understand. Generally speaking, risk moves opposite the yen and there’s also carry unwind when the JPY moves higher. One hot topic in Japan recently has been Prime Minist
Something important happened today. The ubiquitous “people familiar with the matter” confirmed that Saudi Arabia is set to tap international capital markets for the first time in a bond sale worth as much as $15 billion. Although the Gulf’s budget crunch began making front page financial news (final
Ok, so it’s Tuesday, which might as well be Monday thanks to the US and the UK being closed yesterday. I don’t mind penning “news-ish” market updates, but as regular readers here are probably aware, I prefer to outline my take on market themes or macro trends that I think matter from a big picture
If you want to find examples of people making really ill-advised decisions that not only seem silly in retrospect, but also at the exact moment they’re made, the stock market is a great place to start looking. We got a perfect example last week in shares of LendingClub, the beleaguered marketplace l
Well, that escalated quickly. Markets are reacting precisely as one would have expected after two solid weeks of hawkish Fedspeak and it’s not entirely clear how everyone feels about things. Maybe it’s just because the holiday limits news flow as well as overseas volume, but there seems to be a palp
If the leaders of the world’s advanced economies are very concerned about global growth, then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is very, very, very concerned (so that’s three “verys” for Abe versus one “very” for everyone else). To be sure, part of the reason Abe seems to be on the verge of a meltd
If you follow this column you know I talk quite a bit about Japan and the yen. That’s not because I have some special affinity for critiquing Japanese policy. Although I’ll confess that when it comes to central banks, no one eases like BoJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, so there’s something profoundly am
This week was, like last week, mostly about the Fed and about oil. Friday isn’t set to be any different as Janet Yellen will have what’s being billed as a “discussion” with Harvard econ professor Greg Mankiw at 1:15 ET. In a nod to central bank humility, the professor and the chair will talk “about
“That’s a risk that we live with every day and we’re going to live with that every day for many, many years to come, so I think you can’t be on pins and needles and say I’m not going to pursue the right policy for the U.S. because something bad might happen in that situation.”
