In the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, most people thought that shadow banking was all in the past, and good riddance! Today, however, it is becoming clear that shadow banking is also in our future, even centrally so. The crisis was just one step toward that future, revealing weakness in order to force […]
A lot of people have speculated about what would happen when the Fed raised rates, and almost all of them have been surprised. One of them is Zoltan Pozsar, who boldly went on record with the view that corporate cash pools of various kinds would shift out of bank deposits into government-only mutual funds, which […]
“Governments propose, markets dispose,” as Charles Kindleberger liked to say. Starting next year the RMB will be included in the official SDR basket, and that inclusion will have some immediate automatic consequences for official government reserve holdings, but that’s all. History tells us that you don’t get to be a world reserve currency just because […]
It’s hard to short China, but not so hard to short China’s currency, and that’s a problem for the central bank. We’ve all heard about PBOC intervention in the spot exchange market, where the central bank is selling some of its vast horde of USD Treasury securities and buying RMB (thus shrinking its own balance […]
Goldman Sachs takes “A Look at Liquidity”, and tells us what they see. Suffice it to say that different people see different things, depending on their vantage point, like the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Let’s see if we can construct a picture of the animal as a whole from the snapshots provided. What […]
Does this sound familiar? Falling commodity prices, unsustainable official debts, crashing stock markets, pullback in global lending by dominant megabanks, misaligned currencies, plus a healthy dose of political dysfunction. These are the ingredients, according to Charles Kindleberger, that made for world depression in 1929-1939. “My contention is that the difficulty lay in considerable latent instability […]
In the last few weeks, the ECB has been drawing on its liquidity swap line with the Fed, first $308 million for a week, then $658 million for a week, and last week back down to $358 million. What’s that about? It’s not such a large amount. Bank of Japan borrowed more in the past, […]
A summary of the 3rd annual joint conference of the People’s Bank of China and the International Monetary Fund offers a snapshot of the state of debate. So-called “renminbi internationalization” has been official policy since 2009. By the end of this year, expect to see the launch of a new “China International Payments System” to facilitate […]
The 85th Annual Report of the BIS is not perhaps the obvious first choice for beach-reading on a holiday weekend, but having read through its 119 pages, the core message reminds me of nothing so much as the most memorable line of the 40-year-old summer blockbuster “Jaws”: “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” Notwithstanding everything […]
As regular readers know, I emphasize two central functions of monetary systems: payments and market-making. These are the foundation pillars of what I call the “money view”. In my teaching, I have come to appreciate a variety of barriers that people bring with them to the study of money, and to appreciate the necessity of […]