currency wars

The US is the cleanest shirt Last week, I was talking to Megan Greene, the former chief economist at John Hancock for an interview on the US and European economies. And she said something that resonated with me about the global growth…

Yesterday, the overarching message of my post was this bit: "as we think of potential outcomes, policy error has to be a real concern here, especially in 2020 once the cumulative impact of all this takes its full measure." I don't think the…

Trade and Currency Wars I am starting this article just ahead of the equity market open in New York. And S&P futures have the market opening down 1%. The market continues to be unsettled by the political uncertainty around the US-China…

Soft data in the US and Japan was not enough to spur central banks in either country into action over the last two days. For me, it highlights first how vulnerable the global economy is. But, more than that, it points to the ineffectiveness…

By Frances Coppola originally posted at Coppola Comment Japan has just introduced negative rates on reserves, following the example of the Riksbank, the Danish National Bank, the ECB and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Japan has…

Back in January, I said that as far as bond markets go, the convergence to zero would be a dominant issue as the deflationary macro environment made it difficult to raise interest rates. The US is trying to buck this trend, but in doing so,…

According to Jon Hilsenrath at the Wall Street Journal, ECB and PBOC easing aren’t obstacles to a Fed rate hike before year-end. Yet, the Wall Street Journal is running a headline as its top story showing that "U.S. Companies Warn of…

For several months now, I have been hearing stories about the risk of capital flight and capital outflows out of China. At the same time, perhaps as a result of these outflows, traders have recently been trading CNY/USD at the upper end of…

Back in March, I was saying that China would be hard-pressed to maintain its dollar peg if a strong dollar persisted. The deflationary pressures in China are simply too large. Today we learned that it has finally succumbed to that pressure…

My thesis for the global economy right now is that global nominal GDP growth will continue to slow, leading to more policy accommodation, with the outliers converging toward zero. The question mark in this is the Federal Reserve. Generally,…