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Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen testified jointly before the US Senate last week. Inflation was a big topic of conversation. The Fed chair continued to insist that the central can fight inflation if necessary, but that it really isn’t a problem we need to worry about right now. In his podcast, Peter Schiff said the truth is inflation is a problem. And when it comes to dealing with that problem, the Fed is in a box. It will never pick a fight that it can’t win.

The Federal Reserve balance sheet has swelled to a new record of over $7.72 trillion. It was up another $26.1 billion on the week last week. Peter said he expects this number to continue increasing at an even faster rate in the near future.

I would not be surprised to see the balance sheet hit $10 trillion by the end of 2021 because we have a lot of deficit spending in the pipeline and there is no way to pay for it other than the Federal Reserve.”

One of the questions directed toward Powell was about the Federal Reserve’s independence. Powell talked about how important it is. But Peter said the actions of the Fed chair show there’s really no independence at all.

There’s independence in form only, but not in substance. We pretend we have an independent Fed, but in reality, the Fed acts as if it’s just a branch of the US Treasury Department. The fact that both the secretary of the Treasury and the Fed chairman are testifying together shows a degree of cooperation. They’re working together and it seems that they are trying to coordinate their policies.”

The reason the Fed is keeping interest rates so low and expanding its balance sheet is to accommodate the US government as it spends more and more money.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

peter schiff, schiff gold, jerome powell, janet yellen, fed, us federal reserve, us treasury department, us senate, inflation, balance sheet

Update on the Fed’s QE

December 14, 2020

Update on the Fed’s QE

No Wonder the Cry Babies on Wall Street are clamoring for more. Five SPVs, already on ice, will expire on December 31.

The Fed released details today of its corporate-bond purchases in November ($215 minuscule millions) and corporate-bond ETF purchases in November (zilch). Last time it bought any ETFs had been on July 23. It released details about its other activities in its Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), which are essentially on ice. Five of them will expire on December 31, including the SPV that handles the corporate bond purchases.

The Fed unwound its “repo” positions in early July down to zero, and more recently most its “central bank liquidity swaps.” Its purchases of residential mortgage-backed securities (MBS) have been in a holding pattern since mid-September. What it is still buying at a steady clip are Treasury securities, thereby monetizing part of the debt the government is adding monthly to its gigantic pile.

The net effect is that its total assets have edged up just 1.0% since June 24, with a dip in the middle, after exploding higher in the prior three months. This is the Fed’s tool to bail out asset holders during each crisis, and enrich them when there is no crisis:

There is now clamoring among the crybabies on Wall Street that the Fed should increase its asset purchases, and they’re pressuring the Fed to announce a big increase at the next meeting, because, I mean, how else are markets going to keep on going up?

In terms of 2020: Total assets on the Fed’s balance sheet for the week ended December 9 rose by $20 billion from the prior week to $7.243 trillion, but were down a smidgen from the peak on November 18, having gone essentially nowhere over the past five months:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fed Isn’t a Magic Money Tree

June 28, 2020

The Fed Isn’t a Magic Money Tree

There seems to be no end to the Federal Reserve’s arrogance. Fed officials believe that through their wise actions, they can eliminate the business cycle, lower unemployment and make society prosperous.

But it’s actually much more limited in what it can do.

All the Fed can reliably do is stop bank runs and limit liquidity panics. It can also fund (or “monetize”) the U.S. federal deficit, as it has done in recent months.

By buying essentially the same amount of U.S. Treasury securities the government has issued, the Fed has taken pressure to fund mammoth federal deficits off of the private sector.

But such actions are not cost-free.

They store up trouble for the future. These actions swell the Fed’s balance sheet, which will limit the Fed’s flexibility and its willingness to tighten policy during the next inflation spike.

The more the Fed intervenes, the harder it is for it to reverse course without causing damage.

By promising the public that it can do anything more than offer dollar liquidity, the Fed is setting up both investors and workers for disappointment.

Yet it’s going to try anyway. And it’ll only undermine its limited reputational capital in the process.

“Yield Curve Control”

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Fed is considering implementing “yield curve control” in the Treasury market. This policy hasn’t been used since WWII and the early postwar period.

It essentially funded the war effort. If unleashed today, it wouldn’t be done to support a civilization-saving war effort but to maintain the debt-saturated economy to which we’ve become accustomed.

Here’s how it would work in practice:

The Fed would set a target range, or cap, on yields for Treasury bonds of a specific maturity — say, 3-, 5- or 7-year Treasuries.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

ECB v Fed

June 27, 2020

ECB v Fed

QUESTION: Martin,

You mentioned in a recent blog post that the ECB, unlike the FED, can go bankrupt.

Can you explain further?

Not sure where you get the time, energy and resources to research and write all that you do buy it is truly amazing.

Regards,

ANSWER: The Federal Reserve does not need permission to create elastic money. It has the authority to expand or contract its balance sheet. However, it cannot simply print money out of thin air. The ECB is the only institution that can authorize the printing of euro banknotes. The Federal Reserve must back the banknotes by purchasing US government bonds. The Fed buys and sells US government bonds to influence the money supply whereas the ECB influences the supply of euros in the market by directly controlling the number of euros available to eligible member banks. This structure was created because of Germany’s obsession with its own hyperinflation of the 1920s.

Each member state retained its central bank and those central banks issue the banknotes — not the ECB. Therefore, the ECB works with the central banks in each EU state to formulate monetary policy to help maintain stable prices and strengthen the euro. The ECB was created by the national central banks of the EU member states transferring their monetary policy function to the ECB, which in effect operates on a supervisory role.

There are four decision-making bodies of the ECB that are mandated to undertake the objectives of the institution. These bodies include the Governing Council, Executive Board, the General Council, and the Supervisory Board.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WTF: What The Fed?!? (Round 2)

May 19, 2020

WTF: What The Fed?!? (Round 2)

Williams, Maloney, Martenson, Smith: “Trillions more reasons to be concerned”

Back in mid-January, Grant Williams, Mike Maloney, Charles Hugh Smith, Chris Martenson and I sat down for an in-depth discussion on the dangerous distortions to financial markets and the global economy that central bank intervention is causing.

That video, titled WTF: What The Fed?!? was released soon after the US Federal Reserve had added $200 billion dollars to its balance sheet in Q4 2019. At the time, we worried so much liquidity being added to the system so quickly could recklessly exacerbate the extreme overvaluations in the markets, and further increase the instability of our over-indebted economy.

Little could we have guessed that a global pandemic would soon ensue, one that has seen the central banks collectively flood the world with an additional $4 trillion so far, with (much) more anticipated to come. Sure makes that $200 billion look pretty tiny now…

So, if this group of experts was highly concerned about systemic risk pre-coronavirus, what are they thinking now?

$Trillions in new fiat currency printed in less than 2 months. Over 36 million jobs lost. A Q1 GDP drop of -5% and a predicted Q2 drop of -42.8%. And that’s just in the US alone.

These are historically unprecedented developments on a Great Depression-level scale.

The impact of the economic production loss triggered by covid-19 will be painful and with us for years. How bad will it get? What should we expect next? And why are the current prices of financial assets so divorced from the reality of the destruction to the economy?

For these answers and more, watch this 2-minute trailer for WTF: What The Fed?!? Round 2:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

992 Billion Reasons Why The Fed Needs Another Market Crash In The Next Few Weeks

May 13, 2020

992 Billion Reasons Why The Fed Needs Another Market Crash In The Next Few Weeks

Speaking in a video conference organized by the Peterson Institute, turbo money printer Jerome Powell today reassured the market that negative rates are not something the Fed – which expanded its balance sheet by $2.6 trillion in the past two months – is contemplating now. Of course, that will change after the next market crash or if economic shutdowns return, but for now the Fed’s message to traders was clear: don’t push forward fed fund rates negative, which also catalyzed today’s sharp market drop as a key source of potential forced easing was removed.

However, with Powell taking negative rates off the table (for now), it means the Fed has another problem on its hands, one which was first laid out by Deutsche Bank’s credit strategist Stuart Sparks, who in a recent note said that “for all the measures taken by the Fed and fiscal authorities to counter the COVID19 shock, policy remains too tight.” And, as Sparks adds, if the Fed opts to avoid negative policy rates – which appears to be the case – “further easing must be provided by the size and composition of the Fed’s balance sheet”, meaning more QE.

How much more QE? Well, with short-dated market real yields positive, Deutsche Bank estimates that r*, or the neutral rate of interest, has fallen to around -1%, “suggesting additional accommodation required for policy to be “easy” could be more than 100 bp in terms of “policy rate equivalent.“

Previously the Fed had estimated that $100 billion in QE has approximately the same short term impact on growth as 3 bps of rate cuts. This equivalence means that in order to provide a 1% of “rate equivalent” easing, the Fed would need to grow the balance sheet by roughly $3.3 trillion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed Drastically Slashed Helicopter Money for Wall Street. QE Down 86% From Peak Week in March

May 1, 2020

Fed Drastically Slashed Helicopter Money for Wall Street. QE Down 86% From Peak Week in March

Fed shed MBS. Loans to “SPVs” flat for fifth week. Repos in disuse. Fed still hasn’t bought junk bonds, stocks, or ETFs. But it sure sent Wall Street dreaming.

Total assets on the Fed’s balance sheet rose by only $83 billion during the week ending April 29, to $6.656 trillion. That $83 billion was the smallest weekly increase since this show started on March 15, and down by 86% from peak-bailout in the week ended March 25. This chart shows the weekly increases of total assets on Fed’s balance sheet:

The Fed is thereby following its playbook laid out over the past two years in various Fed-head talks that it would front-load the bailout-QE during the next crisis, and that, after the initial blast, it would then cut back these asset purchases when no longer needed, rather than let them drag out for years.

On January 1, the balance sheet stopped expanding as the Fed’s repo market bailout had ended. However, in late February, all heck was breaking loose, and the Fed first increased its repo offerings and then on March 15, started massively throwing freshly created money at the markets, peaking with $586 billion in the single week ended March 25.

But since then, the Fed has slashed its weekly increases in assets, which shows up in the flattening curve of the Fed’s total assets in 2020:

The Fed cut its purchases of Treasury securities. The balance of its mortgage-backed securities (MBS) actually fell. Repurchase agreements (repos) have fallen into disuse. Lending to Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) has not gone anywhere in five weeks. And foreign central bank liquidity swaps, after spiking in the first two weeks, only rose modestly, with most of the increase coming from the Bank of Japan, which is by far the largest user of those swaps.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Fault Lines

April 25, 2020

Weekly Commentary: Fault Lines

Now on a weekly basis, we’re witnessing things that couldn’t happen – actually happen.

April 20 – Bloomberg (Catherine Ngai, Olivia Raimonde, and Alex Longley): “Of all the wild, unprecedented swings in financial markets since the coronavirus pandemic broke out, none has been more jaw-dropping than Monday’s collapse in a key segment of U.S. oil trading. The price on the futures contract for West Texas crude that is due to expire Tuesday fell into negative territory — minus $37.63 a barrel.”

For posterity, the latest numbers on U.S. monetary inflation: Federal Reserve Assets expanded $205 billion last week to a record $6.573 TN. Fed Assets surged $2.307 TN, or 56%, in just seven weeks. Asset were up $2.645 TN over the past 33 weeks. M2 “money” supply surged $125bn last week to a record $16.870 TN, with an unprecedented seven-week expansion of $1.362 TN. M2 inflated $2.329 TN, or 16.0%, over the past year. Institutional Money Fund Assets (not included in M2) jumped $123 billion last week. Over seven weeks, Institutional Money Funds were up $845 billion. Combined, M2 and Institutional Money Funds jumped a staggering $2.207 TN over seven weeks ($100bn less than the growth of Fed Assets).

It’s increasingly clear this pandemic is striking powerful blows at the most fragile Fault Lines – within communities, regions, societies, nations as well as for the world order. To see this disease clobber the most vulnerable ethnic groups and the downtrodden only compounds feelings of inequality, injustice and hopelessness. It is as well stunning to watch COVID-19 hasten the partisan brawl. A nation terribly divided is split only more deeply on the process of restarting the economy. To witness rival global superpowers plunge further into accusation and enmity. And to see the coronavirus viciously attack Europe’s fragile periphery, further splitting a hopelessly divided Europe and pressuring a critical global Fault Line.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Banks Will Not Bail Out The Economy

April 20, 2020

Banks Will Not Bail Out The Economy

These days, we hear a lot that banks were the problem in the 2008 crisis and now they are the part of the solution.

Banking was not the main problem of the 2008 crisis, but one of the symptoms that indicated a more serious disease, the excess risk taken by public and private economic agents after massive interest rate cuts and direct incentives to take more debt coming from legislation as well as local and supranational regulation. Lehman Brothers was not a cause, it was a consequence of years of legislation and monetary policies that encouraged risk-taking.

The second part of the sentence, “now banks are the solution,” is dangerous. It starts from a wrong premise, that banks are stronger than ever and can bail out the global economy. Banking may be part of the solution, but we cannot place, as the eurozone is doing, the entire burden of the crisis on the banks’ balance sheet. I will explain why.

When economists in Europe talk endlessly about the differences in growth and success of monetary and fiscal policy between the United States and Europe, many ignore two key factors. In the United States, according to the St Louis Federal Reserve, less than 15% of the real economy is financed through the banking channel, in the European Union, it is almost 80%. In addition, in the United States, there is an open, diversified, more efficient and faster mechanism to clean non-performing loans and recapitalize the economy that adds to its high diversification in private non-bank financing channels.

It is, therefore, essential that in periods of crisis countries, particularly in Europe, do not relax risk analysis mechanisms, because the economic recovery may be slowed down by ongoing problems in the financial sector and even lead to a banking crisis in the midterm. The worst measure that countries can take in a crisis is to force incentives to take a disproportionate risk.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Happens When The Pandemic Ends?

April 14, 2020

What Happens When The Pandemic Ends?

Let’s assume that by the end of this year a combination of social distancing and some new and effective treatments convert covid-19 from existential threat to chronic nuisance and the economy starts to assume an air of normalcy. Which is to say that people go back to traveling and eating out and buying Chinese-made things they don’t need with money they don’t have.

Are we really home free? Or will some other, even bigger black swan come in for a landing?

To put this question into context, it helps to look at how the world got here. In extremely brief form: We engineered a tech stock bubble in the 1990s that burst in 2000, requiring drastically lower interest rates and truly insane speculation in housing to rescue the big banks. When that bubble burst in 2008, interest rates had to fall even further and even more debt – ranging from government to student to subprime auto (and, yes, mortgage) — had to be taken on to save Wall Street. Hence the term “everything bubble.”

Then came the pandemic, which burst the everything bubble and has convinced the world’s governments that truly astounding amounts of new debt are required to bail out all the parts of the private sector that have more-or-less ceased to exist.

Here, for instance, is the Fed’s balance sheet, which is a proxy for the amount of new currency the central bank has created out of thin air and dumped into the economy. The blue line is GDP growth and the red line is Fed currency creation. Note that more and more currency has to be created to maintain the same anemic growth trend:

And here’s the federal government’s debt. Note the same situation as with the Fed: ever-greater borrowing is necessary to maintain a diminishing rate of growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed’s Balance Sheet Hits $6 Trillion: Up $1.6 Trillion In 3 Weeks

April 2, 2020

Fed’s Balance Sheet Hits $6 Trillion: Up $1.6 Trillion In 3 Weeks

“We’re going to need a bigger chart.”

That’s all one can say when seeing what happened to the Fed’s balance sheet in the past week.

According to the Fed’s latest weekly H.4.1 (i.e., balance sheet) update, as of April 1 the Fed’s balance sheet hit a record $5.811 trillion, an increase of $557 billion in just one week. And when one adds the $88.5BN in TSY and MBS securities bought by the Fed today…

… we can calculate that as of close of business Thursday, the Fed’s balance sheet was an unprecedented $5.91 trillion, an increase of $1.6 trillion since the start of the Fed’s unprecedented bailout of everything on March 13 when the Fed officially restarted QE. And since we know that tomorrow the Fed will buy another $90 billion, we can conclude that as of Friday’s close, the Fed’s balance sheet will be a nice, round $6 trillion.

Finally, here is what the Fed’s balance sheet looks like over a longer timeframe: it shows that in just the past 3 weeks, the Fed’s balance sheet has increased by a ridiculous $1.6 trillion – the same amount as all of QE3 did over 15 months – and equivalent to an insane 7.5% of US GDP.

One more insane statistic: the Fed’s balance sheet was $3.8 trillion in August 2019 when the shrinkage in reserves supposedly triggered the repo crisis. Fast forward, 6 months, when the Fed’s balance sheet is now 60% higher.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the Fed Created a QE “Monster” for the Markets

January 31, 2020

How the Fed Created a QE “Monster” for the Markets

Like Victor Frankenstein, the Fed may have created its own monster. It’s been called many things, such as Quantitative Easing (QE), QE Lite, QE/Not QE, “Organic” Balance Sheet Growth, and more.

But no matter what you choose to call it, the bottom line is this:

The Fed is growing its official balance sheet at a frantic pace to provide liquidity to various banking operations, including the repo markets.

In fact, the balance sheet has grown about $400 billion since August, as reflected in the uptick at the far right of this chart:

Along with the Fed’s decision to increase its balance sheet is a rise in risky asset prices. According to a piece at Newsmax, this is raising eyebrows:

Prices for stocks and other risky assets are also rising at a fast clip – a state of affairs that a growing chorus of investors, economists and former Fed officials say is no coincidence, and potentially a problem.

This pattern of rising prices in risky assets is similar to what happened when the Fed initiated the first three rounds of QE.

The potential problem behind a pattern like this is the “monster” that the Fed is creating. Addressing the problem means answering a critical question…

When and how does the spigot of Fed cash flow get turned off?

Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer with Bleakley Advisory Group, thinks we will have to wait and see what happens:

The risk is what happens when the Fed stops increasing their balance sheet… What will stocks do when that liquidity spigot stops? We’ll have to see.

Of course, if we “wait and see”, any potential damage to the economy will already have started.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

He Knows

January 15, 2020

He Knows

Last week we found out that Dallas Fed president Kaplan knows that the Fed is creating excess and imbalances in stocks. Yes, bloating the Fed’s balance sheet by over $400B in four months has a massive impact on stock markets. And billions of repo liquidity unleashed each day can be seen impacting the daily action as well (see: Repo Lightning).

So what’s Jerome Powell have to say about all this? Silence. Not a word. Of course he doesn’t have to because the crack reporters never confront him on the issue in his post Fed meeting press conferences. Bubble away accountability free. Why bother asking the hard questions? That may just get you disinvited from the next press conference. Too strong of an assessment? I let you be the judge, but why are the hard questions not asked when it matters?

But actually we don’t need to wait for the answer from a press conference. Why? Because we already know the answer and the answer is: He knows.

Powell knows exactly the behavior he’s instilling in investors, the artificial levitation of asset prices and the disconnects and dangers that is poses.

All one has to do is dig in the Fed minutes from October 2012. Pages 192-194. It’s all there:

“I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.
First, the question, why stop at $4 trillion? The market in most cases will cheer us for doing more. It will never be enough for the market. Our models will always tell us that we are helping the economy, and I will probably always feel that those benefits are overestimated.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trapped

December 8, 2019

Trapped

What? You thought a 850+ point drop in the $DJIA would result in a down week? No Sir. The unholy alliance has struck again. Massive jawboning by multiple administration officials about how well the China trade deal was going, a favorable jobs report and above all, the US Federal Reserve, all contributed to a furious rally to make markets green for the week on (when else?) magic risk free Friday.

What was the tell? The same tell it’s been every week since the beginning of October. When the Fed’s balance sheet rises so does the market. One down week in the Fed’s balance sheet coincided with the only down week in markets since then.

Before you know it you have a trend (via zerohedge):

This is how predictable our markets have become. Tell me the size of Fed’s balance sheet next week and I’ll tell you what markets will do next week. Is it really this farcical? It appears so.

By that measure of course we can presume markets will just keep rising until next June as the Fed has indicated “not QE” will continue until then and their daily repo operations are now the ones on autopilot.

Investors are rightfully cheering gains having now realized that nothing matters but the Fed.

But be careful in cheering too much. All this action hides a rather very uncomfortable fact, a fact that may eventually see the air come out of this ballon faster than it is going in.
And that fact is that the Fed, and all other central banks, are trapped. Trapped in a coming disaster of their own making.

And be clear: As we saw this week again, the air can come out quickly. After all 90% of November gains simply disappeared in a matter of a couple of days. The subsequent furious comeback leaving a rather unusual weekly candle on $SPX (I’ll discuss this separately in an upcoming technical update).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed’s Balance Sheet Reduction Reaches $402 Billion

January 6, 2019

Fed’s Balance Sheet Reduction Reaches $402 Billion

The QE unwind has started to rattle some nerves.

For the past two months, the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the Fed’s QE unwind has been deafening. The Fed started the QE unwind in October 2017. As I covered it on a monthly basis, my ruminations on how it would unwind part of the asset-price inflation and Bernanke’s “wealth effect” that had resulted from QE were frequently pooh-poohed. They said that the truly glacial pace of the QE unwind was too slow to make any difference; that QE had just been a “book-keeping entry,” and that therefore the QE unwind would also be just a book-keeping entry; that QE had never caused any kind of asset price inflation in the first place, and that therefore the QE unwind would not reverse that asset-price inflation, or whatever.

But in October last year, when all kinds of markets started reversing this asset price inflation, suddenly, the QE unwind got blamed, and the Fed – particularly Fed Chairman Jerome Powell – has been put under intense pressure to cut it out. Yet it continues:

The Fed shed $28 billion in assets over the four weekly balance-sheet periods of December. This reduced the assets on its balance sheet to $4,058 billion, the lowest since January 08, 2014, according to the Fed’s balance sheet for the week ended January 3. Since the beginning of this “balance sheet normalization,” the Fed has now shed $402 billion.

According to the Fed’s plan released when the QE unwind was introduced, the Fed is scheduled to shed “up to” $30 billion in Treasuries and “up to” $20 billion in MBS a month – now that the QE unwind has reached cruising speed – for a total of “up to” $50 billion a month. So how did it go in December?

Treasury Securities

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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