Money and Finance
- The Death Of The Dollar? – By Rob Arnott
To no one’s surprise, the Fed announced that it will replace the expiring “Operation Twist”—in which it was selling $45 billion of short maturity treasuries and buying a like amount of long maturity treasuries every month—with continued purchases...
- Richard Duncan Quotes
Longer excerpt from The New Depression (taken from my Kindle highlights, so the excerpts aren't necessarily the paragraphs I have put them in below, and there may be things in between that I didn't highlight). “The amount...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Reality Of The Situation
For nearly two years, the massive interventions of central banks have repeatedly pulled a fundamentally weak and debt-burdened global economy from the brink of resumed recession. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet is now leveraged 52-to-1, with assets...
- Demand For U.s. Debt Is Not Limitless - By Lawrence Goodman
Thanks to Will for passing this along. The conventional wisdom that nearly infinite demand exists for U.S. Treasury debt is flawed and especially dangerous at a time of record U.S. sovereign debt issuance. The recently released Federal Reserve Flow of...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: A Wile E. Coyote Market
The overall effect of the incoming economic data is to suggest that while upcoming earnings reports may be reasonably good from a rear-view perspective of the second quarter, earnings guidance for the second-half of 2011 could tend to be either weak or...
Money and Finance
Sprott December Comment: Is it all just a Ponzi scheme?
In the latest Treasury Bulletin published in December 2009, ownership data reveals that the United States increased the public debt by $1.885 trillion dollars in fiscal 2009. So who bought all the new Treasury securities to finance the massive increase in expenditures? According to the same report, there were three distinct groups that bought more than they did in 2008. The first was “Foreign and International Buyers”, who purchased $697.5 billion worth of Treasury securities in fiscal 2009 – representing about 23% more than their respective purchases in fiscal 2008. The second group was the Federal Reserve itself. According to its published balance sheet, it increased its treasury holdings by $286 billion in 2009, representing a 60% increase year-over-year. This increase appears to be a direct result of the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing program announced this past March. Most of the other identified buyers in the Treasury Bulletin were either net sellers or small buyers in 2009. While the Q4 data is not yet available, the Q1, Q2 and Q3 data suggests that the State and Local governments and US Savings Bonds groups will be net sellers of US Treasury securities in 2009, while pension funds, insurance companies and depository institutions only increased their purchases by a negligible amount.
So who was the third large buyer? Drum roll please,... it was “Other Investors”. After purchasing $90 billion in 2008, this group has purchased $510.1 billion of freshly minted treasury securities so far in the first three quarters of fiscal 2009. If you annualize this rate of purchase, they are on pace to buy $680 billion of US treasuries this year - or more than seven times what they purchased in 2008. This is undoubtedly the group that made the US deficit possible this year. But who are they?
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- The Death Of The Dollar? – By Rob Arnott
To no one’s surprise, the Fed announced that it will replace the expiring “Operation Twist”—in which it was selling $45 billion of short maturity treasuries and buying a like amount of long maturity treasuries every month—with continued purchases...
- Richard Duncan Quotes
Longer excerpt from The New Depression (taken from my Kindle highlights, so the excerpts aren't necessarily the paragraphs I have put them in below, and there may be things in between that I didn't highlight). “The amount...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Reality Of The Situation
For nearly two years, the massive interventions of central banks have repeatedly pulled a fundamentally weak and debt-burdened global economy from the brink of resumed recession. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet is now leveraged 52-to-1, with assets...
- Demand For U.s. Debt Is Not Limitless - By Lawrence Goodman
Thanks to Will for passing this along. The conventional wisdom that nearly infinite demand exists for U.S. Treasury debt is flawed and especially dangerous at a time of record U.S. sovereign debt issuance. The recently released Federal Reserve Flow of...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: A Wile E. Coyote Market
The overall effect of the incoming economic data is to suggest that while upcoming earnings reports may be reasonably good from a rear-view perspective of the second quarter, earnings guidance for the second-half of 2011 could tend to be either weak or...