Monetary Policy

Today’s dilemma – for financial markets and central bankers – is that pushing back against nascent “risk off” unleashes another forceful bout of “risk on.” At this point, it’s either Bubble on or off – destabilizing either way. The global Bubble has grown too distended and the market backdrop too dysfunctional. Central bankers over the past 25 years have created excessive “money,” while incentivizing too much finance into financial speculation. There is now way too much “money” crowded into the securities and derivative markets, and the upshot is an increasingly hostile backdrop for leverage and speculation.

In what sounds like the plot of a McCarthy-era propaganda spy novel, the Socialists and Communists have overthrown the government in Portugal. That means it's time for the troika to start pushing back against the undesirables by threatening the country with financial ruin. Just call it "tough love." 

With the US bond markets closed for Veterans' Day, it is time to take a breath and examine how far (and how fast) yields have moved in the last few weeks. With the entire curve bursting higher, we focus on the 10Y yield which will need to fight through critical resistance here if rates are to continue to rise.

Many think of government interference like friction in a car: the more you add, the slower the car. One source of friction is the same as any other.

Monetary policy doesn’t quite work the way tax or regulation does.

There is little evidence currently that the rally over the last couple of months has done much to reverse the more "bearish" market signals that currently exist. Furthermore, as noted by Jochen Schmidt, the current market action may be more indicative of market topping process. Not unlike previous market topping action, the markets could indeed even register "new highs," as witnessed in both 2000 and 2007 before the major market correction begins. This is typically how "bull markets" end by providing false signals and sucking in the last of those willing to "buy the top." The devastation comes soon after.

While the market may still rally to new highs, the late August free fall in stock prices and spike in volatility served as a wake-up call for investors. In the past ten weeks, major equity indices have recovered virtually all those losses, giving investors an unusual second opportunity to position their portfolio for an important inflection point in monetary policy as the Fed likely starts raising interest rates. Simply put, investors who were not properly positioned and frustrated by their performance in the late August swoon are being given a do-over.

Goldman Sachs -> Treasury -> PIMCO -> The Fed

The ongoing failure of China to achieve any stabilization in its economy, after already cutting interest rates six times in the past year, and the prospect of a U.S. interest rate hike in December, had made markets increasingly jittery and worried which is not only why the S&P 500 Index had its biggest drop in a month, but thanks to the soaring dollar emerging market stocks are falling for a fourth day - led by China - bringing their decline in that period to almost 4 percent, and the global stock index down for a 5th consecutive day.

The failure of the Fed’s policies of massive money creation, corporate bailouts, and quantitative easing to produce economic growth is a sign that the fiat money system’s day of reckoning is near. The only way to prevent the monetary system’s inevitable crash from causing a major economic crisis is the restoration of a free-market monetary policy.

Today’s system is essentially a system that can drift ever further away from reality through temporal discoordination, resource misallocation and eventually capital consumption. The final coordinating mechanism is nothing less than economic recession. Without them society would regress, impoverishing first the poor, then the middle class and in the end all socioeconomic layers of society.

Compare and contrast:

- In the US, after 7 years of ZIRP and QE, the expected December rate hike is supposed to push up inflation and confirm the economy is improving; it is naturally bullish for stocks.
- In Europe, a year and a half of NIRP and a year of QE, a December rate cut further into negative territory is supposed to push up inflation and confirm the economy is improving; it is naturally bullish for stocks.

Once again, the two major macroeconomic announcements over the weekend came from China, where we first saw an unexpected, if still to be confirmed, increase in FX reserves, and then Chinese trade data once again disappointed tumbling by 6.9% while imports plunged 18.8%. So how did the market react? The Shanghai Composite Index rose for a fourth day and reached its highest since August 20because more bad data means more easing from the PBOC, and just to give what few investors are left the green light to come back into the pool, overnight Chinese brokers soared after Chinese IPOs returned after a 5 month hiatus. Elsewhere, Stocks and currencies in emerging markets slump on prospect of higher U.S. borrowing costs before year-end and after data underscored slowdown in Asia’s biggest economy. Euro strengthens.

Here comes Goldman, not two months after it said that the Fed should think about easing, with what can only pass for Sunday evening humor saying that 7 years to the day after it landed on the zero bound on December 16, 2008, the Fed will hike because, "the economy might start to overheat by late 2016/early 2017 unless growth slows from the current pace".