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’The collateral crunch gets monetary
Back in 2011, FT Alphaville made a big point of highlighting that tight bank funding conditions in the eurozone were largely driven by a “crunch” in the supply of quality collateral.
While such things as repo rates,
Fantasy Fed options
While the world seems divided on whether Friday’s Jackson Hole meeting will result in the announcement of a fresh round of quantitative easing or not — we thought we’d run with the premise that QE in its conventional form is now redundant or impossible.
Crisis! We’ve got new words for the crisis
Sometimes, existing words just don’t cut it and you have to come up with some new ones. Or get your readers to do it for you.
In the current economic climate FT Alphaville has been running out of imaginative ways to convey a sense of imminent destruction.
Shelling out during the Great Depression
A relic from an earlier cash crisis, via the NY Fed’s Liberty Street Blog:
Fascinating: “As the clamshell went from person to person, it was signed, and when cash became available again, the clamshell could finally be redeemed.”
Great Recession not that great after all, apparently
It’s amazing how little a few trillion dollars gets you these days.
We like a wee bit of historical perspective here on FT Alphaville, and this week’s edition compares the costs of the recent financial crisis with those of its antecedents.
BIStoric
The Bank for International Settlements — the central banks’ bank — has done something great.
BIS has scanned and stuck all its historic annual reports online, in one easy-to-access place. The reports,
The Fed’s last QE experiment…
The latest edition of the St Louis Fed’s Monetary Trends note — of off-the-chart monetary base growth fame — has a short and punchy section on the United States’ first bout of quantitative easing, in the,
A depressing decade
That’s from S&P Indices, with data until Dec. 18th.
Taking into account last week, the S&P 500 ended up rising an impressive 23.5 per cent in 2009 — but still not enough to stop the index from posting its first negative total return.
Great Depression-esque bad debt at US banks
This is a rather arresting chart:
That’s from Moody’s, showing how the pace of charge-offs (write-offs on bad debt) for rated US banks now exceeds the early years of the Great Depression.
The banks incurred $45bn of loan charge-offs in the third quarter,
Just how big a problem is falling capacity utilisation?
Former commodity mega-bulls Goldman Sachs are expecting markets to continue to pull back from current levels in the near term as “fundamentals are not yet stable enough to support higher prices”, according to their latest Commodity Watch.
IMF: “worrisome parallels” with the Great Depression
The IMF has pre-released two chapters from its forthcoming World Economic Outlook.
Chapter 3: From recession to recovery: How soon and how strong?
Chapter 4: How linkages fuel the fire: The transmission of financial stress from advanced to emerging economies
The following excerpts rather put all the recent talk of green shoots into perspective.