On Global Markets

The last month has seen much in the way of, often justified, gloomy introspection from European policymakers. Isabel Schnabel, a member of the European Central Bank’s policy-setting executive board made a useful speech on the 2nd of October rather tellingly entitled “Escaping Stagnation”. The raw facts speak for themselves, since the pandemic, the European economy […] 

Setting economic policy is hard. There are all sorts of reasons for this. For a start, the exact economic impact of any particular policy lever, interest rate change, law, or tax tweak is rarely entirely clear. Well-credentialed and good-meaning experts can, and do, disagree on the likely impacts. The responses to the Clark Center’s polls […] 

Federal Reserve meetings are rarely, outside of an immediate crisis, especially tense for market participants. Whilst On Global Markets has noted – more than once – that the market implied path of policy rates is rarely a useful guide to actual police outcomes over the medium to longer term, investors usually have a good handle […] 

Go back two or three decades and private credit was a small and rather niche segment of the financial ecosystem. If firms wanted to raise debt finance they generally either borrowed from a bank (either from a single institution or from a collection of entities via a syndicated loan) or raised the money on public […] 

Economics found itself back in the headlines in the United Kingdom this week. This time around though the issue was – thankfully – not declining standards, a slide in the value of sterling, or a near-crisis in government debt markets, all things with which British newspaper readers have become familiar with over the past two […] 

It is highly unlikely that when the Founding Fathers gathered to design the new US constitution they were thinking about the needs of future economists. Regardless of this, the institutional structure they adopted for the new United States has proved to be a boon for empirically focused social scientists. The quirk of US Federalism which […] 

Today is a big day for Fed Watchers, with Fed  Chair Jerome Powell set to make his keynote address at the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium. At the time of writing, some hours before Powell takes to the podium, Bloomberg has gone as far as to carry a live countdown building up to […] 

Over the last decade a growing proportion of stock trading has been concentrated into the later stages of the day. As a story on Bloomberg, which caught the attention of many investors and market participants, put it in April – US stocks trade for 390 minutes a day, but only the last 10 minutes seem […] 

It’s been a long week for global financial markets. It at least has certainly felt that way.  Monday saw the largest daily fall in the value of Japanese equities since 1987, with the Topix index plunging by 12% followed by a rough day for European and North American exchanges and, for much of the day, […] 

Winston Churchill once remarked that “if you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions”. Sadly for policymakers, economists offering up multiple opinions and caveating even themselves has never been a uniquely British trait. Harry Truman became so sick […]