Jan 26, 2018 | Monetary Policy
Central banks are increasingly altering the perception of their reaction functions to allow tighter (or less easy) monetary policy. At the ECB, discussion of so-called “supercore” inflation has re-emerged. This consists of the components of the HICP basket that have a...
May 20, 2016 | European Economy, Monetary Policy
An ongoing theme we kept coming back to throughout 2015 in the eurozone is that monetary policy tends to either too hot or too cold for the core or periphery. The ECB’s attempts to fight deflation and reflate the periphery have fuelled increases in German mortgages...
Mar 11, 2016 | Monetary Policy
Financial conditions are slowly but surely tightening. We have had one actual rate hike by the Fed, but conditions had begun to tighten before this. This is primarily a developed market phenomenon. Real M1 for the G7 has been trending down for the past 6 months....
Aug 27, 2015 | Global Economy, Monetary Policy
Stock markets are experiencing a classic crash pattern. Volatility has spiked and sharp sell offs are often being followed by powerful rallies. As with previous crash patterns, we would expect markets to continue to gyrate wildly for around the next 8 weeks,...
Apr 24, 2015 | European Economy, Monetary Policy
The sharp devaluation in the euro and the rapid acceleration in economic activity will mean short-term inflation dynamics in the eurozone will soon start surprising to the upside. In this context it is important to remember that the only justification for ECB...
Feb 26, 2015 | Global Economy, Leading Indicators, Monetary Policy
As we remind our readers often, yield curves are one of the single best leading indicators. A yield curve inversion has predicted every US recession since 1945, with only one false positive, in 1966 (although the false positive preceded a downturn in industrial...
Dec 5, 2014 | Monetary Policy, UK
Easy monetary policy in the UK is looking ever more inappropriate. Divisia money is a weighted money-supply measure. Higher forms of money, eg notes and coins have greater weights than less liquid forms of money, such as building society deposits. Thus Divisia...
Jan 13, 2014 | Monetary Policy, Press, US Economy
Variant Perception’s editor Simon White spoke to BNN this morning about the future course of Fed policy and the US labour market. Highlights included the likelihood that the Fed will stay looser for longer as well as how the market may have overestimated the...
Nov 15, 2013 | Featured, Global Economy, Monetary Policy, US Economy
One of the themes that we have been highlighting this year is the growing bubble in corporate bonds. It is pointless in the first instance to discuss whether super easy monetary policy that has fueled this bubble is appropriate or not. The main thing for investors to...
