Populists may be wrong in their prescriptions, but they are not wrong in their prognoses. Inequality If it feels like inequality, it probably is. 1% of the world’s population hold 47% of its wealth. To qualify, they must have at least 700,000 USD in assets. The share of wealth of the top 1% has been

In recent times equity and credit markets have reacted to bad news with optimism, reasoning that weaker economic data would encourage the central banks to cut rates which would in turn boost the economy and support higher asset valuations. This is a perverse logic but one that supports trillions of dollars in investments. This year,

Fiscal policy will join monetary policy in the fight against stagnation. 10 years of loose monetary policy has inflated assets while failing to raise growth or inflation. Orthodoxy is slowly pivoting towards fiscal policy. The textbook dangers of unlimited monetary and fiscal support are, excessive and rising national debt and the eventual loss of confidence

For a while now, the Fed funds effective rate has pushed up against the upper bound of the Fed funds target rate. If not for the Fed, short term rates would have risen above the target range. We see this pressure in repo rates, not just this week but for some months now, where repo

Since the ECB announced a rate cut of 0.1% taking the desposit facility rate to -0.50% and a resumption of bond purchases at a rate of 20 billion EUR per month, the 10 year bund yield has predictably moved from -0.71% to -0.45%, a 0.26% rise, substantial when yields are that low. The ECB’s move