Federal Reserve

The following is excerpted from a commentary originally posted at www.speculative-investor.com on 23rd September 2012.

The following is excerpted from a commentary originally posted at www.speculative-investor.com on 19th August 2012.

The US Great Depression lasted from 1929 until 1945, but the deflationary phase of the Depression effectively ended in 1932.

Just when we think that Bernanke has exhausted his ability to come up with harebrained schemes to distort prices, he proves us wrong.

“Is the Fed a Failure?” is the title of an article by Gene Epstein in the 27th February edition of Barrons magazine. The article draws on the work of economist George Selgin to argue that the answer to the question is yes, the Fed is a failure. Unfortunately, while this is the right answer the method used to come up with it is not persuasive.

The media has been happily reporting that the Fed is making itself “more transparent” with the news that Bernanke will now give quarterly press conferences AND that today the Fed releases the names of the banks who borrowed from the discount window during the 2008 banking system collapse.  The quarterly press conference is a bunch of … Continue reading

By The Mogambo Guru 03/10/11 Tampa, Florida – It would be an understatement to say that I was flabbergasted to see that the monetary base jumped $130 billion dollars in two weeks! Well, using an exclamation point as punctuation seems to confirm my suspicions that I was, indeed, flabbergasted, as the term seems, somehow, appropriate … Continue reading

By now everyone knows that Bill Gross/Pimco has sold down his/its Treasury exposure to zero.  Rather than ask “why,” quite frankly, my question has been “why did it take so long?”   In other words, anyone who knows anything about the bond market knows that it would be sheer stupidity to own Treasury bonds in a … Continue reading

The Fed’s insatiable desire to redo all the debt monetization mistakes of the Weimar republic continues. This week, the Fed’s balance sheet hit a fresh all time high of $2.55 trillion, primarily as a function of increasing Treasury holdings. Not adding today’s $7.2 billion POMO to the total holdings, the Fed’s total Treasury holdings increased … Continue reading

The steady climb in Fed assets continues, with the left side of Bernanke’s balance sheet swelling to just under $2.5 trillion, as US Treasury holdings hit $1.13 trillion, implying that the Fed’s DV01 continues to increase on a daily basis with every single POMO, as we have been pointing out since last summer, and which … Continue reading