On Global Markets

Chairman Powell’s much anticipated remarks took financial markets by surprise last week. Judging by the rapid price movements after his comments hit the tape, traders had been expecting less decisive steer on the direction of interest rates. The yield on the policy-sensitive two-year US government bond fell by almost ten basis points while a widely-watched […] 

A couple of months ago, your columnist noted that the US economy was living in the pause; the 90-day period during which the Liberation Day tariffs had been suspended, but during which it was unclear exactly what would come afterwards. It seemed unlikely that the Federal Reserve would move policy until greater clarity on trade […] 

The latest non-farm payrolls data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was clearly not received well in the White House. Unusually large back revisions to the figures for June and May suggest that the jobs market has slowed more sharply than originally believed over the last three months.  President Trump’s response was to immediately […] 

Warfare, especially the sort of prolonged fighting against a near-peer adversary that has characterised the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, is a very costly business. Those costs are measured in both human suffering and financial terms. More than three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its own casualties have likely topped one million, whilst Ukraine […] 

Bipartisanship has been in short supply in Congress so far this year, but a notable exception, it seems, has been made for stablecoins. The GENIUS Act, or to give it its full name, the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, passed the House by 308 to 122 votes. The new law sets […] 

Whilst economic policy uncertainty, as previously discussed by On Global Markets, has notable macroeconomic downsides, it can, at least, provide useful event studies for empirically minded economists. This week saw just such an episode. On Wednesday morning, reports emerged that, at a meeting with Congressional representatives at the White House the day before, President Trump […] 

By any reasonable definition, New Zealand is a small economy. The latest estimates from the International Monetary Fund suggest that the Pacific Nation’s GDP, weighted by purchasing power parity, represents just 0.2% of total global output. But the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) has been something of a trailblazer when it comes to monetary […] 

In March 2022, in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of a Western-led sanctions package, some analysts became a little overexcited. Some went as far as to speculate whether Russia faced a ‘1998 style moment’ – referring to the country’s late 1990s default and economic crisis – or even a […] 

This week the Federal Reserve held its key policy rate steady at 4.25%-4.5% and the so-called ‘dot plot’ (the best guess forward projections of Federal Open Market Committee members) continued to show two cuts were expected this calendar year. One might assume, given the lack of change in either the policy rate or the immediate […] 

The rise of social media is one of the big stories of the twenty-first century. Facebook may only be 21 years old, but, according to a Pew Research study of 2024, more than two-thirds of Americans now use it. YouTube has an even larger footprint, with 83% of American adults using the platform to consume […]