Cash Glut in Eurozone Drives Dollar Demand
wsj.com
wsj.com
> The interest rates on three-month euro cross-currency basis swaps, in which one party borrows a currency and lends their own in return, have turned more negative in recent weeks. That means traders in Europe are paying a premium to exchange excess euros for dollars.
Demand for dollars is on a tear, sending the value of the dollar higher. You can see this in the DXY, an index of the dollar's value against a basket of other currencies:
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=dxy
This inconvenient fact about the strengthening dollar is swept under the rug by those focused on inflation and their claims that the US is headed for 1970s stagflation at best, or Weimar 1920s hyperinflation at worst.
Also conveniently swept under the rug are the deeply negative yields on 10-, 20-, and 30-year treasuries.
And then there's gold, which has failed spectacularly as an inflation hedge. If the inflation threat is real, gold doesn't give a flip about it because the price hasn't moved in one year. For that matter gold is about the same price in nominal terms that it was ten years ago.
These three markets, gold, treasuries, and the dollar, don't fit the money printer go brrr narrative. What gives?
What gives is that the Fed isn't printing money and lacks the authority to do so. QE is not a printing press. It doesn't conjure money into being. QE can't cause inflation and its effects on long-term interest rates are questionable at best.
The dollar, debt, and gold markets are signaling that the next major move is toward slower growth and lower inflation. Maybe a lot lower.
Whatever the Fed announces or doesn't announce tomorrow is mostly theater.
You can go to the feds website and see the dollar amount of bonds they are buying every month. Where exactly do you think this money comes from? They buy these bonds with newly created money. In the modern system they don't literally print paper money they do it through the expansion of credit. Their bond buying absolutely explains low bond yields.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/domestic-market-operation...
They buy the bonds with different bonds.
One bond is a (say) 25 year bond at 2.5%, the other is a perpetual bond at federal funds rate that can only be held by those with a Federal Reserve account.
And all that does is change the composition of the asset side of a bank meaning they get less free income.
Money things are everywhere and are perpetually created and destroyed all the time.
Almost every source focusses on the purchase of the treasury from the bank while completely ignoring the other side of the ledger.
No money creation occurs in QE. It simply converts a treasury held by a bank into a reserve asset held at the Fed.
It's easy to confirm that QE has little to no effect on treasury yields. Just look at the long term trend in the 30-year. If anything there is a negative correlation between Fed bond buying and long-term bond prices. That's the opposite of what should happen if the Fed were moving the market.
More than that, the long-term channel since the 1980s in yields hasn't budged, despite multiple rounds of QE. That's not control over the market.
Read this: https://themacrocompass.substack.com/p/tmc-6-all-they-told-y...
Banks wont lend (=print) more because of risk/reward ratios. Credit worthiness and yields.
I like the terminology “inside money” and “outside money” as well.
The key point is that when the Fed buys a bond from an investor that investor has cash which they can then take an buy something else with. Bond buying drives down rates and to the extent rates are kept low because of the bond buying causes other assets like stocks and real-estate to inflate in price because instead of buying another bond the investor buys some other kind of asset. People then take out loans collateralized by these inflated assets and there is your inflation. So long as you always keep total borrowing on an uptrend over time you basically create permanent inflation.
When talking about money and banking, the word "money" is useless at best.
Reserves, Federal Reserve notes (i.e. paper money), coins, deposits, Treasuries, commercial paper, gold and wampum are each money. Central banks converting Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities into reserves lets commercial banks create deposits at greater scale. That ceteris paribus increases aggregate demand which can put pressure on broader price levels.
I like how someone can read a story about banks having too much money and not being able to lend it out fast enough, resorting to parking it in an incredibly low yield asset and the take away is "aha! see inflation is not and will not be a problem! Central banks don't actually print money"
Gold may be a shitty inflation hedge this go-around. But the stock market doesn't appear to be. Do you think its weird the stock market is up 30% from the peak prior to a global pandemic? Where do you think that money came from, or is that just optimism, because you know, we all handled this pandemic so well?
PE ratio is pretty high historically, only higher briefly in 2000 and 2008, both before huge corrections
https://www.macrotrends.net/2577/sp-500-pe-ratio-price-to-ea...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4lz2NF6qkc
And more broadly with zombification of EU economy and balance sheet recession as explained in Richard Koo The Holy Grail of Economics.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3689019-the-holy-grai...
The dollar in this situation is just less bad then other currencies. There is no broad demand for gold because no one has gold-denominated debts.
And Weimar style hyperinflation had always been a fantasy (plus no one mentions that Weimar economy was huge impulse for modernization of German industry at the time).
The Feds only job is to oversee the creation of new money. It was given that power by Congress in 1913:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_central_banking_in_...
"The Federal Reserve System — also known as the Federal Reserve or simply as the Fed — is the central banking system of the United States today. The Federal Reserve's power developed slowly in part due to an understanding at its creation that it was to function primarily as a reserve, a money-creator of last resort to prevent the downward spiral of withdrawal/withholding of funds which characterizes a monetary panic."
Wouldn't that indicate it working as an inflation hedge? :) But yes, you're absolutely right, I bought some gold half-sovereigns as a chaos hedge back in 2008 and occasionally note the lack of significant action in their price. Nice shiny objects, though.
People talking about inflation on the internet are mostly stopped clocks endlessly repeating a narrative to each other. If you look out the window at some real prices you can see there's been a real supply shock but the dollar economy remains absolutely central.
No, you want it to hold value in real terms.
Libor - interest rates
ISDAfix - swaps
Platts - oil prices
WM/Reuters - FX
High-Frequency Trading - equities
Commodities - Gold, Silver Stock indices
Are all rigged. So these markets will not give you a truthful signal on what is going on.
https://twitter.com/wmiddelkoop/status/1470997851052429320
These companies that manipulate the commodity prices, they occasionally settle or are forced to pay some (relatively) small amount of money as punishment and then they continue business as usual. Because apparently the benefits outweigh the costs ...
This is narrowly literally true of physical currency (the Bureau of Engraving and Printing prints the Federal Reserve Notes that are US currency, the Fed just distributes them), but it otherwise completely misses the point of money creation via monetary policy.
More evidence for the meme that the "real" economy is unrelated to the stock market and the bankers economy. For rich people, everything is going up. For ordinary people, everything is getting worse. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Gold was captured and centralized in WW2. Formalized with Bretton Woods. Formally repudiated by Nixon in 1971. Gold and silver demonetization has been happening for decades and the gold bugs can't see it.
Fed hot air is stupid show and provides reporters something to publish.
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gold-reserves
and appears to be divesting form the dollar
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/russia-to-remove-dollar-asse...
China has also 4x the reserved gold since 2008
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gold-reserves
That being said, I generally agree the "gold standard" has been shattered. That said, the future is likely something like crypto that can be tracked and monitored closely.
I myself took part of the system of biying ,,physical'' gold eithout really touching it myself, thereby helping the system of paper gold.
Euro central bank interest rates: -0.5 % [1]
Euro inflation (Nov.): 4.9 % [2]
This yealds a Euro netto interest rate of -4.95 %
Dollar FED interest rates: +0.05 % [3]
Dollar inflation (Nov.): 6.8 % [4]
This yealds a Dollar netto interest rate of -6.75 %
[1] The article mentions -1 %, but I couldn't find a confirmation for this.
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/11563387/2-3...
[3] Per article.
[4] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
You're not taking into account the very real risk that the Euro doesn't exist in 5 or 10 or 20 years.
Many, many people in (PIGS)[1] do not appreciate being tied to the deutschemark.
[1] No offense meant.
"""If you asked us what our biggest foreign policy concerns were in 1900, we would have told you to worry about war with the British Empire and keep close to France.
In 1920, we would’ve been friends with the British, and Germany would be crushed and humiliated.
In 1940, we’d be at war with Germany and it wouldn’t be a one-sided kerb-stomp[0], and we’d be allied with the Soviets against them.
In 1970, we’d be friends with the Germans and in an Armageddon race against the Soviets.
In 1985, the Soviets seemed unassailable but at least we weren’t going to blow each other into radioactive glass.
In 1992, the Soviets were gone."""
[0] None of this language is an exact quote, but especially not this bit. I think the original dates were aligned on either decades or 20s of years?
Inflation is only bad if you intend on spending that currency on goods and services affected by that inflation. Currency investors are not doing that, they'll just sell for another currency.
They count on the following set of assumptions:
* The inflation we're seeing is transitory, and almost all of it has already materialized
* FED will give in to the political pressure and increase interest rates
* ECB is more isolated from politics and will not
He's been on many podcasts to explain his theory and provide updates. I will link you an interview at realvision from september 2020 timestamped at 51:55 where he goes through it in summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_HCIyc6MaA&t=51m55s
She has a very good post about this same topic titled "The Global Dollar Short Squeeze":
https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/
Recommended.
2. 2020 was offset by US Fed buying tons of UST and USG printing USD. However, global economy cannot magically expand by 40% or whatever is required to balance that expansion of USD. Hence a persistent supply chain crisis.
In current geopolitical climate, no foreign state will buy lots of UST. US Fed is still buying lots of UST, causing a liquidity glut causing inflation. Global economy physically cannot expand at the necessary rate to absorb this inflation, so stagflation or financial collapse is the only way forward for America.
Why is the Federal Reserve pouring money into the financial system? Answer lies in short-term issues and structural market changes https://www.ft.com/content/345da16e-d967-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1....
They get paid to borrow and then paid to deposit what they just borrowed. Anyone see a problem with this risk-free infinite money mechanism?
It's an exchange not a conversion, which means there has to be an equal and opposite flow in the other direction.
Euros borrowed cannot be put on deposit at the Fed because the Fed uses dollars. So there has to be an exchange with somebody who had Fed dollar deposits, and wants Euro deposits.
Source: I used to do this trade for a fund.
Lol. No.
That's like saying "the US military is part of the government so it can bomb Canada without consequences"
Being related to a government does not absolve you of all consequences of your actions.
When does the working class become a side in the equation of the purpose and value of stable money?
EU banks get paid to take money/loan then get paid to deposit it. Regular people don't get access to this scam, which is ultimately paid by 6%+ commodity inflation felt by working class in USA.
That's objectively not happening.
> When does the working class become a side in the equation of the purpose and value of stable money?
When employment becomes part of the Fed mandate.
It is [1].
[1] https://www.chicagofed.org/research/dual-mandate/dual-mandat...
It's an exchange, not a conversion remember.
Somebody has to hold the money in their ecb account at some point, because everything is merely an exchange.
You can't get rid of it. All you can do is move it around.
They are getting paid for risk-free paper shuffling.
Moreover, what OP is describing (infinite money mechanism) is an arbitrage situation, so any risk-free profit opportunity would quickly vanish and parity would be reached.
When I (and many other euroskeptics) said that eurozone in decline and you de facto had a recession in some european countries(See germany) BEFORE covid(looking back from at least 2018 through 2019, ironically slowing down due to covid), people "chuckled" because there was no press agreeing with this narrative.Yet a lot of european banks and institutions (DB,etc) had a lot of problems internally, and euro was mainly growing/floating due to developing parts.
I struggle to see how the situation improved on a continental-scale considering the fact that we've been locking down our society for 2 years, whereas China, Africa,even North America, all don't or didn't have nowhere near as many restrictions.