Posts Tagged ‘Gerhard Schroeder’

Notes From Underground: Trump Has Weaponized The Dollar. Do the Longs Know?

June 12, 2019

Some shots were fired last Friday, but it seems that the markets can only hear the siren song of White House tweets. There was an important story from Bloomberg reporter Saleha Mohsin titled, “Trump’s Currency War Plan Puts Treasury and Commerce at Odds.” The article noted that “a Commerce Department proposal to impose countervailing tariffs on countries that it determines have devalued their currencies has alarmed officials at the Treasury Department.”

It appears that President Trump has grown frustrated by Treasury’s failure to name any country as a “currency manipulator.” It has been Treasury’s bailiwick to monitor the foreign exchange interventions of countries who strive to artificially hold down the value of their currencies in an effort gain a competitive advantage versus any G20 country, especially the U.S. (from the Treasury Department perspective).

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Notes From Underground: Which Spark Will Start the Prairie Fire?

September 27, 2017

In several blog posts over the last eight years I have used the words of Mao to relate to the potential issues that could cause severe disruption to the global financial system. If you listen to the narrative propagated by the mainstream financial media your concerns would revolve around North Korea, the Trump tax and healthcare plans, the FED starting QT (or else citing the Fed’s ridiculous dot plots), concerns about the potential shutdown of the U.S. government, the economic implications of Brexit, etc. The bottom line is that all the forecasters have been wrong for long as Phillip Tetlock revealed in his wonderful book, Superforecasting. The FED has been worshiped as all-knowing fonts of wisdom when nothing they have forecast has proven correct. Yesterday, Fed Chair Janet Yellen admitted that the FED is as confused about the lack of inflation as most of the prognosticators on Wall Street. This confirmed my theory that what the FED peddles IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.

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Notes From Underground: ECB’S Mario Draghi Dances, DOLLAR LONGS SEARCH FOR AN EXIT

June 6, 2013

In a “flash,” the LONG DOLLAR positions of the taper crowd came a crashing down upon committed U.S. dollar bulls. The position unwinding started during President Mario Draghi’s press conference. I was a very attentive listener to the Q&A session and am very hard pressed to see anything positive about Europe in Draghi’s answers. In fact, the EURO began its rally just after said that the ECB was “… technically ready for negative rates.” It seems that the ECB council was again discussing the possibility of having EONIA go negative in an effort to unlock the bank deposits currently sitting at the ECB. The fact that the ECB has drawn up plans for “GOING NEGATIVE” is not a bullish EURO indicator. The most bullish and honest statement from President Draghi was he maintained that the ECB has been the most conservative of all the central banks.

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