Benjamin Cole | The US Senate Banking Committee Jan. 17 voted thumb’s up on Jerome Powell, President Trump’s appointment to the Chair of the Federal Reserve. Barring calamity, Powell should take over in February.
Many important assets have been trapped in broad trading ranges in recent years despite substantial political upheaval Some examples are the US Treasury 10-year yield which moved between 1.5-2.5% for 3 years or the German Bund 10-year yield between 0-1% for 3 year. According to BoAML, “this inability of yields, the US dollar & volatility to break out reflects the inability of the economic cycle to generate strong growth & inflation.”
The Corner | April 12, 2015 | Earnings season is warming up on Wall Street. During the week the major US banks will present their results (tomorrow, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo), which will impact the course of American stocks in the short/medium term. Should US companies show a pessimistic picture with their 1Q earnings, that would mean the US economy is in worse shape than predicted. But are these expectations part of a wider game?
WASHINGTON | By Mike Konczal at The New Republic, via The Next New Deal | Our problem today was not caused by a lack of business and banking regulations,” argued Ron Paul in his 2009 manifesto End the Fed, which outlined a theory of the financial crisis that only implicated government policy and the Federal Reserve, while mocking the idea that Wall Street’s financial engineering and derivatives played any role. “The only regulations lacking were the ones that should have been placed on the government officials who ran roughshod over the people and the Constitution.”
WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | According to the IMF, Russia and Italy have about the same nominal GDP, though, if you adjust it to its purchase parity power, the Russian economy may be 50% greater than Italian. Still, Russia has two and a half times the population of Italy, which explains why its nominal GDP per capita is half of Spain’s (even in real terms, Spaniards are 60 percent richer than Russians). So, Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve for its country a global importance that, taking its economy into account, it does not deserve.
NEW YORK | Have Libor scandal shock waves reached this side of the Atlantic yet? There is no doubt they will. It may impact American consumers and the U.S. financial system: Barclays is the only bank confessing malpractices so far, although Wall Street has almost surely been involved in the same dynamics. So far we've only seen the tip of the iceberg but it sends a warning signal to the…
NEW YORK | Restless and suspicious. That is how Wall Street seems to be feeling after France and Greece’s pushback against austerity measures. U.S. stock futures fell on Monday, while Treasuries gained. Investors wonder whether the stimulus advocated will derail bailout deals. And what will happen now that the Sarkozy-Merkel tandem is broken and the Greek parliament will have three new anti-bailout parties represented. This added to the uncertainty created by…
LONDON | The US 2012 election result can do little to change the fate of Wall Street under the extreme pressures of a global credit crunch and a relentless economic crisis. In a paper issued Monday by JP Morgan Asset Management, the investing company said that the financial sector will likely shrink after having become quite large a share of the country’s economy. “One side effect of that process, lower secondary…
NEW YORK | When feeling overwhelmed with all the economic misery originated by a reckless Wall Street and a lax Washington, the regulator in chief, one tends to calm down thinking positively: at least we learnt the lesson. As the Chinese say, in every crisis there is also an opportunity, and maybe we improved the system. Yet then some articles come up: one pointing to the fact that lenders are…
The press all over the world is debating the repercussions of the imminent agreement between Greece –and the EU– and the International Institute for Finance (IIF), chaired by Charles Dallara and which holds $206 billion of the the total $350bn of Greek sovereign bonds (the ECB has another $60bn). According to the Financial Times, the agreement would require a haircut of 68% but what seems to be the most difficult to issue…