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.”
Well, the big story today is again crude, as Brent topped $50 (before pulling back) putting pressure on the dollar in what will continue to be the most important market tug-of-war when it comes to how risk is bid. Earlier this month, I explained that everything seems to be trading off of oil, which
I’ve thought (and written) quite a bit about what Deutsche Bank called “quantitative tightening” last autumn. The concept, like many complicated-sounding ideas, is actually simple: countries hold reserves to guard against economic turmoil and when they sell those reserves in times of stress it amoun
Sometimes it seems like no one gets it when it comes to the Chinese yuan, which is really too bad because in many ways, what happens to the renminbi determines the direction for risk assets. Last August, the market was abuzz with news that Beijing had decided to let the market play a more active
