Recent content by boneyard bill

They want from $85 billion a month to nothing. Not actually. 40% of that was mortgage backed securities and 60% was US Treasuries. Nevertheless, they went from nearly $50 billion a month in purchases to nothing at all and bond yields barely budged. Surely, you should expect a spike interest...

Back door QE is when the Fed gets someone else to buy US Treasuries and then reimburses them in some way. There have been quite a few suspicious large bond purchases, for example, in Belgium and Luxembourg lately. These purchases approach the entire GDP of Belgium and dwarf the GDP of...

That's the bind that the Fed is in. They cannot admit that they're going to print money forever because confidence in the dollar would implode. Already, we're having difficulty finding buyers of Treasury securities, and China has now even begun to un-load some of their holdings. They're down...

Again, I stand corrected. The last figure I had seen for excess reserves was less than $2 trillion. Nevertheless, Fed money creation has been extraordinary by historical standards. At that same time, that money creation and US Treasury borrowing hasn't offset the deleveraging that has gone on...

Amendment to post: I have to correct a point in my original post. I said a rising dollar would mean higher prices for imports. That is incorrect. It would mean lower prices for imports. Therefore, its' effect would be deflationary but not recessionary. It is the higher prices of US exports that...

Deleted. Duplicate post.

Thank you for your report on the Baltic Dry Index. That doesn't alter the fact that commodity prices are falling all around the world. The Chinese government has intervened massively to keep the stock market from falling, but has failed to stop the decline. Yes, it may still be high than it...

I think it's all Kabuki. They don't want the world to think that they're going to do QE forever because that collapse confidence in the dollar. So they'll talk about raising rates. But they won't do anything significant. They might raise short term rates by 25 or 50 basis points, but in the...

The Chinese stock market is in free fall. Commodity prices are plunging world wide. The Baltic Dry Index is at pre-2009 levels. The transportation index is also way down. We seem to be experiencing a world-wide deflation even though the world's central banks have been creating money like crazy...

That's the problem. With Trump on the stage he might not get more than 39 seconds of speaking time. I think his numbers are likely to go from the debate, but I think other candidates also have a lot of upside potential. Carson seems a lot smarter to me than Herman Cain was four years ago, but...

I don't disagree with Rand's remarks. In fact, I think you could argue that Rand's comments were quite courageous. But I'm suggesting that they were not helpful to his campaign, and that opposition to government police among blacks is very different from opposition to government police by most...

I hate to say this, but it looks like the Rand Paul campaign is in serious trouble. There is, of course, the disappointing fund-raising news. It isn't that Rand has raised so little money, it's that he has raised little compared to his competition. What would have been a successful effort 4...

I find it hard to believe that Rand is polling only 4% in New Hampshire when his father garnered 25% of the vote against Romney in 2012. I realize that it's a much larger field now. Nonetheless, 4% seems absurdly low from the "live free or die" state.

All the examples that were given in this article referred to the general election and not to the primaries. Even then, they were quite as stretch. If anyone made a special "law and order" appeal in '68, it was George Wallace, not Richard Nixon. And Dukakis adamantly stood by his "furlough"...

Politically, this is a clever move on Rand's part. First of all he can say, "Look, I'm no isolationist. I want to go to war against ISIS." On the other hand he can also say, "But we've got to do it constitutionally." Of course, this won't please the warmongers who want the US military at their...