Home » Posts tagged 'boj'

Tag Archives: boj

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

The U.S. Dollar Collapse Is Greatly Exaggerated

September 1, 2020

The U.S. Dollar Collapse Is Greatly Exaggerated

The US Dollar Index has lost 10% from its March highs and many press comments have started to speculate about the likely collapse of the US Dollar as world reserve currency due to this weakness.

These wild speculations need to be debunked.

The US Dollar year-to-date (August 2020) has strengthened relative to 96 out of 146 currencies in the Bloomberg universe. In fact, the U.S. Fed Trade-Weighted Broad Dollar Index has strengthened by 2.3% in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The speculation about countries abandoning the U.S. Dollar as reserve currency is easily denied. The Bank Of International Settlements reports in its June 2020 report that global US-dollar denominated debt is at a decade-high. In fact, US-dollar denominated debt issuances year-to-date from emerging markets have reached a new record.

China’s dollar-denominated debt has risen as well in 2020. Since 2015, it has increased 35% while foreign exchange reserves fell 10%.

The US Dollar Index (DXY) shows that the United States currency has only really weakened relative to the yen and the euro, and this is based on optimistic expectations of European and Japanese economic recovery. The Federal Reserve’s dovish announcements may be seen as a cause of the dollar decline, but the evidence shows that the European Central Bank (BOJ) and the Bank Of Japan (BOJ) conduct much more aggressive policies than the U.S. while economic recovery stalls. Recent purchasing manager index (PMI) declines have shown that hopes of a rapid recovery in Europe and Japan are widely exaggerated, and the Daily Activity Index published by Bloomberg confirms it. Furthermore, the balance sheet of the ECB is at the end of August more than 54% of the eurozone GDP and the BOJ´s is 123% versus the Federal Reserve’s 33%.

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

The Fed’s Couldn’t Even Stomach a 10% Drop in Stocks… It’s Officially in the Bubble Business

June 18, 2020

The Fed’s Couldn’t Even Stomach a 10% Drop in Stocks… It’s Officially in the Bubble Business

The Fed will soon be buying stocks.

Earlier this week, the Fed announced that it will begin buying corporate bonds from individual companies. Before this announcement, the Fed was already involved in the:

  • The Treasury markets (US sovereign debt)
  • The municipal bond markets (debt issued by states and cities)
  • The corporate bond markets by index (debt issued by corporations)
  • The commercial paper markets (short-term corporate debt market)
  • And the asset-backed security markets (everything from student loans to certificates of deposit and more).

With the introduction of individual corporate bonds, the Fed is now one step closer to buying stocks outright.

Indeed, the Fed has made ZERO references to stopping its monetary madness. Just yesterday Fed Chair Jerome Powell emphasized to Congress that the Fed is “years away from halting its assets monetization scheme.” 

Again, the Fed is explicitly telling us that it plans on buying assets (Treasuries, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, etc.) for years to come.

The next step will be for the Fed to buy stocks.

It won’t be the first central bank to do so…

The central bank of Switzerland, called the Swiss National Bank has been buying stocks for years. Yes. It literally prints money and buys stocks in the U.S. stock markets.

Then there’s Japan’s central bank, called the Bank of Japan. It also prints money and buys stocks outright. As of March 2019, it owned 80% of Japan’s ETFs.

Yes, 80%.

The BoJ is also a top-10 shareholder in over 50% of the companies that trade on the Japanese stock market.

If you think this can’t happen in the US, think again. The Fed told us in 2019 that it would be forced to engage in EXTREME monetary policies during the next downturn.

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

Bank Of Japan Buys Record Amount Of ETFs, Admits ‘Paper Losses’, Plans Program Expansion

March 10, 2020

Bank Of Japan Buys Record Amount Of ETFs, Admits ‘Paper Losses’, Plans Program Expansion

Having blown over two trillion yen since October in purchasing stocks (ETFs) in the open market to “support Japan’s economy,” markets are rife with speculation the Band of Japan (BoJ) could pledge next week to buy ETFs at a faster pace than the current commitment to do so by roughly 6 trillion yen ($58.12 billion) per year.

Following pressure from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,

“Markets are making nervous movements amid uncertainty over the global economic outlook. Based on agreements made among G7 and G20 nations, the government will work closely with the BOJ and authorities of other countries to respond appropriately,” Abe said in a meeting with ruling party executives on Tuesday.

Reuters  reports that such a step is among options the central bank may consider if it approaches the ceiling as a result of aggressive purchases, according to sources familiar with the BOJ’s thinking.

In a somewhat surprising moment of transparency for the Japanese central bank, BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told parliament the BoJ had bought a cumulative 2.04 trillion yen worth of ETFs since October last year.

Kuroda also revealed the BoJ’s own estimate showed its holdings of ETFs may incur paper losses once Tokyo’s Nikkei stock average falls below 19,000 – 19,500. The Nikkei stood around 19,665 on Tuesday after briefly slipping below 19,000 in morning trade.

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

The Collapse Of This Historic Correlation Suggests A Major Crisis Is Imminent

February 21, 2020

The Collapse Of This Historic Correlation Suggests A Major Crisis Is Imminent

A lot of digital ink has been spilled in recent days over the perplexing reversal of the Yen, which for years was seen by the market as a “flight to safety” trade (as unexpected crisis events would prompt capital repatriation into Japan or so the traditional explanation went), only to suffer a major selloff in the past week as it suddenly started trading not as a funding currency for risk-on FX pairs, but as a risk asset itself.

To us, the reversal is far less perplexing than some smart people make it out to be: with Japan now effectively in a recession following the catastrophic Q4 GDP print which crashed 6.3% annualized, validated by today’s just as terrible PMI report…

.. and with Japan now set to suffer a major hit due to the coronavirus epidemic spreading like wildfire across the region, it is only a matter of time before the BOJ follows the ECB and Fed in reversing what has been years of QE tapering, and either cuts rates further into negative territory or expands its QQE (with yield control), and starts buying equities (although with the central bank already owning more than 80% of all ETFs, one wonders just what risk assets are left for the central bank to buy). Needless to say, both of these would have an adverse impact on the yen, and potentially lead to destabilization in the Japanese bond market which for years has defied doom-sayers, but it will only take one crack in the BOJ’s confidence for Japan’s entire house of cards to fall apart. That said, we are not there quite yet.

Furthermore, after the bizarre move in the prior two days, overnight the JPY appears to regain some normalcy, when it traded as it should (i.e., it was once again a risk-off proxy), with the USDJPY sliding during the two major “risk-off” events overnight.

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

“This Is Insanity!” – Jim Rogers Warns Of “Horrible Time” Ahead

January 13, 2020

“This Is Insanity!” – Jim Rogers Warns Of “Horrible Time” Ahead

The Fed has increased its balance sheet over 500% in the past decade; The Bank of Japan is printing money to buy bonds and stock ETFs; and The European Central Bank is mired in insane negative interests. And, according to legendary investor Jim Rogers, they will continue this “madness” as long as its necessary.

In an interview with RT’s Boom Bust, Rogers exclaims, that interest rates around the world have never been this low:

“… this is insanity, that’s not how sound economic systems are supposed to work.”

In 2008, Rogers notes that we had problems because of too much debt, however, “since then the debt has skyrocketed everywhere and it’s going higher and higher. We are going to have a horrible time when this all comes to an end.”

Adding that:

…eventually, the market is going to say: ‘We don’t want this, we don’t want to play this game anymore, and we don’t want your garbage paper anymore’.”

And when that happens, Rogers warns that central banks will print even more and buy even more assets.

“And that’s when we will have very serious problems… We all are going to pay a horrible price someday but in the meantime it’s a lot of fun for a lot of people.”

When it comes to an end, Rogers laments, “it will be the worst of my lifetime.”

The Fed Detests Free Markets

November 29, 2019

The Fed Detests Free Markets

Paul Gauguin Tahitians at rest (unfinished) 1891

To be completely honest, I wrote -most of- the second part of this a while ago, and then I was thinking this first part should be part of the second, if you can still follow me. But it doesn’t really, it’s fine. I wanted to write something to address how little people know and acknowledge about how disastrous central bank policies have been for our societies and economies.

Because they don’t, and they have no clue, largely and simply because of the way central banks are presented both by themselves and by the financial press that covers them. Make that “covers”. Still, going forward, we will have no way to ignore the damage done. All the QE and ZIRP and NIRP will turn out to be so destructive for us all they will rival climate change or actual warfare. That’s what I wanted to talk about.

You see, free markets are a great idea in theory. Or you can call it “capitalism”, or combine the two and say “free market capitalism”. There’s very little wrong with it in theory. You have an enormous multitude of participants in an utterly complex web of transitions, too complex for the human mind to comprehend, and in the end that web figures out what values all sorts of things, and actions etc., have.

I don’t think capitalism in itself is a bad thing; what people don’t like is when it veers into neo-liberalism, when everything is for sale, when communities or their governments no longer own anything, when roads and hospitals and public services and everything that holds people together in a given setting is being sold off to the highest bidder. There are many things that have values other than monetary ones, and neo-liberalism denies that. Capitalism in itself, not so much.

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

Ex-BOJ Chief Regrets Not Hiking, Hated QE, Says Sub-1% Interest Rates Don’t Work

November 29, 2019

Ex-BOJ Chief Regrets Not Hiking, Hated QE, Says Sub-1% Interest Rates Don’t Work

Things are going from bad to worse in Japan: 7 years after BOJ chief Kuroda launched QQE (subsequently with yield curve control) while monetizing tens of billions in ETFs, the central banks has failed to boost either Japan’s economy or its inflation, both a dismal byproduct of Japan’s record debt load. So now that the BOJ has failed to remedy what was the consequence of massive debt loads, Japan has a cunning plan: unleash another tsunami of debt.

According to the Japan Times, Japan is set to “re-embrace the power of public spending” – because apparently the country with the world record setting 250% debt/GDP somehow did not embrace public spending before – with one of its biggest ever stimulus packages. Pointing to slowing global growth, a higher sales tax and a string of natural disasters, policymakers in Tokyo are the latest to join the worldwide shift toward a double-barreled approach of supporting the economy through fiscal measures and ultraloose monetary policy, which as we have noted before is a preamble to MMT and full-blown debt monetization by the government.

That’s good news for the Bank of Japan, which has “appeared” (but only appeared, because it now owns so many of Japan’s ETFs it has to start lending them out to prevent a market freeze) reluctant to ramp up its own massive stimulus program, as it strains at the limits of effectiveness.

As a result, in less than a month, expectations in Japan for a “modest” stimulus package with a face value of ¥5 trillion ($46 billion) have quadrupled to ¥20 trillion, despite having the developed world’s largest public debt load. And there is much more to come.

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

Analysts Stunned After Lagarde Demands “Key Role” For The ECB In Climate Change

November 28, 2019

Analysts Stunned After Lagarde Demands “Key Role” For The ECB In Climate Change

Having failed miserably to “trickle down” stock market wealth for a decade as was their intention, something Ben Bernanke made clear in his Nov 4, 2010 WaPo op-ed, central banks have moved on to more noble causes.

Over the weekend Minneapolis Fed chair Neil Kashkari suggested it was time to allow central banks to directly decide how to redistribute wealth, stating unironically that “monetary policy can play the kind of redistributing role once thought to be the preserve of elected officials”, apparently failing to realize that the Fed is not made up of elected officials but unelected technocrats who serve the bidding of the Fed’s commercial bank owners.

Failing to decide how is poor and who is rich, central bankers are happy to settle with merely fixing the climate.

Overnight, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda joined his European central banking peers by endorsing government plans to compile a fiscal spending package for disaster relief and measures to help the economy stave off heightening global risks. Kuroda said that natural disasters, such as the strong typhoon that struck Japan in October, may erode asset and collateral value, and the associated risk may pose a significant challenge for financial institutions, Kuroda said.

In short, it’s time for central banks to target global warming climate change:

“Climate-related risk differs from other risks in that its relatively long-term impact means that the effects will last longer than other financial risks, and the impact is far less predictable,” he said. “It is therefore necessary to thoroughly investigate and analyse the impact of climate-related risk.”

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

The Lessons From Japan’s Monetary Experiment

November 28, 2019

The Lessons From Japan’s Monetary Experiment

A recent article in the Financial Times, “Abenomics provides a lesson for the rich world“, mentioned that the experiment started by prime minister Shinzo Abe in the early 2010s should serve as an important warning for rich countries. Unfortunately, the article’s “lessons” were rather disappointing. These were mainly that the central bank can do a lot more than the ECB and the Fed are doing, and that Japan is not doing so badly. I disagree.

The failure of Abenomics has been phenomenal. The balance sheet of the central bank of Japan has ballooned to more than 100% of the country’s GDP, the central bank owns almost 70% of the country’s ETFs and is one of the top 10 shareholders in the majority of the largest companies of the Nikkei index. Government debt to GDP has swelled to 236%, and despite the record-low cost of debt, the government spends almost 22% of the budget on interest expenses. All of this to achieve what?

None of the results that were expected from the massive monetary experiment, inventively called QQE (quantitative and qualitative easing) have been achieved, even remotely. Growth is expected to be one of the weakest in the world in 2020, according to the IMF, and the country has consistently missed both its inflation and economic growth targets, while the balance sheet of the central banks and the country’s debt soared.

Real wages have been stagnant for years, and economic activity continues to be as poor as it was in the previous two decades of constant stimulus.

The main lessons that global economies should learn from Japan are the following:

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

BOJ To Start Lending ETF Shares To Prevent Market Freeze

October 29, 2019

BOJ To Start Lending ETF Shares To Prevent Market Freeze

While most central banks are contemplating how to gently break it to the public that since they are out of ammo with interest rates at all time low, and $15 trillion in global sovereign debt is now yielding negative – a financial abortion which suggests the value of money is negative – the only hope markets have to avoid collapse is for central banks to start buying stocks in the open market, the BOJ has no such problems: after all the Japanese central bank (alongside its Swiss peer) has for years been quite open that it purchases stocks and ETFs directly. Unfortunately, in its efforts to stabilize the market, the BOJ has been purchasing a little too many ETFs and it now owns far too much.

Last May, speaking to Japanese parliamentarians, BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda noted that the central bank now owns nealry 80% of the country’s stock of ETFs, the result of a program begun in 2010 and ramped up in 2013.

Unfortunately, the program failed in its immediate task: the main goal of ETF buying was to lower Japan’s equity-risk premium – the extra returns investors expect for buying stock rather than simply parking their money in riskless government debt. A lower premium should raise stock prices and make equity financing easier for listed companies. But at just shy of 7%, Japan’s premium remains stubbornly above the U.S.’s 6%—with the gap little changed in six years – according to Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Now what is truly terrifying is that the impact of the BOJ’s massive equity purchases is actually not easily visible in Japanese stock valuations as share prices have actually fallen as a multiple of earnings during the course of the program.

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

The Fed is Lying to Us

October 19, 2019

The Fed is Lying to Us

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie”

The recent statements from the Federal Reserve and the other major world central banks (the ECB, BoJ, BoE and PBoC) are alarming because their actions are completely out of alignment with what they’re telling us.

Their words seek to soothe us that “everything’s fine” and the global economy is doing quite well. But their behavior reflects a desperate anxiety.

Put more frankly; we’re being lied to.

Case in point: On October 4, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell publicly claimed the US economy is “in a good place”. Yet somehow, despite the US banking system already having approximately $1.5 trillion in reserves, the Fed is suddenly pumping in an additional $60 billion per month to keep things propped up.

Do drastic, urgent measures like this reflect an economy that’s “in a good place”?

The Fed’s Rescue Was Never Real

Remember, after a full decade of providing “emergency stimulus measures” the US Federal Reserve stopped its quantitative easing program (aka, printing money) a few years back.

Mission Accomplished, it declared. We’ve saved the system.

But that cessation was meaningless. Because the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped right in to take over the Fed’s stimulus baton and started aggressively growing its own balance sheet — keeping the global pool of new money growing.

Let’s look at the data. First, we see here how the Fed indeed stopped growing its balance sheet in 2014:

And we can note other important insights in this chart.

For starters, you can clearly see how in 2008, the Fed printed up more money in just a few weeks than it had in the nearly 100 years of operations prior.

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

Square Minus Zero

June 20, 2019

Square Minus Zero

Gustave Courbet The village maidens  1852

I intentionally start writing this mere minutes away from Fed chair Jay Powell’s latest comments. Intentionally, because the importance ascribed to those comments only means we have gotten so far removed from what capitalism and free markets are supposed to be about, that it’s pathetic. The comments mean something for rich socialists, but nothing for the man in the street. Or, rather, they mean that the man in the street will get screwed worse for longer.

And it’s not just the Fed, all central banks have it and do it. They play around with rates and definitions and semantics until the cows can never come home again. And they have such levels of control over their respective societies and economies that the mere use of the word “markets” should result in loud and unending ridicule. There are no markets, because there is no price discovery, the Fed and ECB and BOJ got it all covered. Any downside risks, that is.

But it doesn’t, because the people who pretend they’re in those markets hang on central banks’ every word for their meal tickets. These are the same people we once knew as traders and investors, but who today function only as rich socialists sucking the Fed’s teats for ever more mother’s milk.

Our economic systems have been destroyed by our central bankers. Who pretend they’re saving them. And we all eat it up hook line and sinker. Because the rich bankers and their media have no reasons to counter Fed or ECB actions and word plays, and because anyone who’s not a rich banker or investor is kept by the media from understanding those reasons.

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

Bank of Japan & the Bond Crisis

April 26, 2019

Bank of Japan & the Bond Crisis 

BoJ Statement 4-24-2019

The Great Financial Unknown is now upon us. After 10 years of Quantitative Easing, the European Central Bank (ECB) in Europe owns 40% of the national debts in the EU and it can neither sell them nor stop buying without creating a Panic in Interest Rates. Likewise, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) owns between 70% and 80% of the ETF bond market in Japan. The Bank of Japan confirmed it is ending free market determination of interest rates for the municipal level and that they “will not require any procedures such as auction as the method of determining lending conditions.”  today it may introduce a lending facility for its exchange-traded fund buying program, which would allow it to temporarily lend ETFs to market participants.

4. Introduction of Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) Lending Facility
The Bank will consider the introduction of ETF Lending Facility, which will make it possible
to temporarily lend ETFs that the Bank holds to market participants.

The statement at the end of the announcement on the last page on its monetary policy has left traders in shock. This appears that the BoJ realizes that it now effectively has destroyed its bond market and realizes that there is not only the end of a free market, but there is a contagion of surrounding lack of liquidity.

We have never before in the history of human society ever witnessed such a major financial crisis. The BoJ makes it clear it will continue its policy of Quantitative Easing. It stated plainly:

The Bank will continue with “Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing (QQE) with
Yield Curve Control,” aiming to achieve the price stability target of 2 percent, as long as it is
necessary for maintaining that target in a stable manner.

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

Weekly Commentary: Dudley on Debt and MMT

February 24, 2019

Weekly Commentary: Dudley on Debt and MMT

December’s market instability and resulting Fed capitulation to the marketplace continue to reverberate. At this point, markets basically assume the Fed is well into the process of terminating policy normalization. Only a couple of months since completing its almost $3.0 TN stimulus program, markets now expect the ECB to move forward with some type of additional stimulus measures (likely akin to its long-term refinancing operations/LTRO). There’s even talk that the Bank of Japan could, once again, ramp up its interminable “money printing” operations (BOJ balance sheet $5.0 TN… and counting). Manic global markets have briskly moved way beyond a simple Fed “pause.”

There was the Thursday Reuters article (Howard Schneider and Jonathan Spicer): “A Fed Pivot, Born of Volatility, Missteps, and New Economic Reality: The Federal Reserve’s promise in January to be ‘patient’ about further interest rate hikes, putting a three-year-old process of policy tightening on hold, calmed markets after weeks of turmoil that wiped out trillions of dollars of household wealth. But interviews with more than half a dozen policymakers and others close to the process suggest it also marked a more fundamental shift that could define Chairman Jerome Powell’s tenure as the point where the Fed first fully embraced a world of stubbornly weak inflation, perennially slower growth and permanently lower interest rates.”

And then Friday from the Financial Times (Sam Fleming): “Slow-inflation Conundrum Prompts Rethink at the Federal Reserve: Ten years into the recovery and with unemployment near half-century lows, the Federal Reserve’s traditional models suggest inflation should be surging. Instead, officials are grappling with unexpectedly tepid price growth, prompting some to rethink their strategy for steering the US economy.

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

We Are Entering The “Quantitative Failure” Narrative

January 10, 2019

We Are Entering The “Quantitative Failure” Narrative

For a decade, the world brushed off any concerns about soaring global debt under the rug for a simple reason: between the Fed, the ECB and the BOJ, there was always a buyer of last resort, providing an implicit or, increasingly explicit backstop to bond prices, in the process creating the biggest asset bubble in history as investors seeking return were forced to buy first fixed income securities and then equities and other, even riskier securities.

However, as BofA’s Barnaby Martin is the latest to point out, “early 2019 will be uncharted territory for the market” because after years of central bank purchases crowding investors into risky assets, this dynamic will now reverse. As Zero Hedge readers have observed on countless occasions, the yearly growth of central bank balance sheets is now turning negative as shown in the following chart.

The upshot of this, in Martin’s view, is that markets will continue to experience more “corrections” than normal, leading to bigger and fatter trading ranges for credit spreads in Europe this year.

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

Post navigation

← Older posts

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress