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  • Monetary Policy – The N-Word

    Alexander Gloy

    In this excerpt from the December 2012 “Letter to Investors” we look at what looms when the Federal Reserve will embrace nominal-GDP targeting, possibly as early as 2013: Monetary Policy – The N-Word

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  • “Who moved my recession?”

    Alexander Gloy

    Lakshman Achutan, ECRI (Economic Cycle Research Institute) made a recession call for the US on September 30, 2011 (and confirmed it multiple times since then). Gary Shilling, titling his August letter “Global Recession”, says “We are already in a global recession.” However, equity markets don’t think so, with the S&P 500 trading less than 10%…

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  • Analyze this: The Fed is not printing enough money!

    Alexander Gloy

    Before you trash me in the comments, hear me out. It started off with Ray Dalio’s “beautiful deleveraging”, which inspired this post. Since the financial crisis, the Fed has increased its balance sheet from $900 billion to $2.9 trillion (red line in below chart). The difference is $2 trillion (or 13% of GDP). When the…

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  • The “beautiful” deleveraging

    Alexander Gloy

    Some of my clients like to challenge my (admittedly gloomy) views, forcing me to think – which isn’t such a bad thing to do. It started off with Cam Hui’s “A Dalio explanation of Evans-Pritchard’s dilemma“. After laying down his strategy on winning the game of Monopoly, Dalio goes on to model the economy onto…

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  • You got Bernanked: Three years gone in three weeks

    Alexander Gloy

    US Bond market: Over the last three weeks, 10-year US government bond yields increased from 1.4% to 1.81% (green line below) while 30-year went up from 2.46% to 2.93% (red line in second chart): To put things into perspective: Here are those movements on a longer time scale (together with 5-year yields, blue, and the…

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  • All roads lead to a disintegration of the Euro

    Alexander Gloy

    Our investment thesis can be summarized as follows: Equities are worthless when associated debt becomes encumbered (risk capital takes the  first loss). Equity is not an asset; it is merely the remainder that is left over once debt is subtracted from assets. Recent GDP growth was possible only thanks to massive deficit spending and monetary…

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  • David versus Goliath – the SNB against everybody else

    Alexander Gloy

    A picture says more than a hundred words, so I wanted to present in graphical terms what happened at the Swiss National Bank over the last few quarters. Unfortunately, the SNB does not provide foreign currency positions including derivatives on an absolute basis, but here are the unhedged figures:   The SNB increased FX positions…

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  • Mental contortions of a printing machine operator

    Alexander Gloy

    “We never pre-commit” is the standard answer the ECB (European Central Bank) has for anyone asking about future interest rates (journalists regularly waste one of their two permitted questions at ECB press conferences). Why should central bankers not indicate future interest rates decisions? Because market participants will price that information accordingly, so the announcement would…

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  • Inside Job at the SNB?

    Alexander Gloy

    The official version: “Enormously dedicated” SNB chairman Philipp Hildebrand purchases 500,000 USD days before he devalues the Swiss Franc by 10%. This plain-vanilla spot currency transaction becomes “water cooler” story at Bank Sarasin (which wouldn’t even open accounts below 1 million minimum deposit). An IT employee takes pictures of incriminating documents, briefly weighs the consequences…

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  • The ghost of the Bundesbank haunting the halls of Brussels

    Alexander Gloy

    In his book “More money than God”, Sebastian Mallaby describes how George Soros received a signal from Helmut Schlesinger (president of Bundesbank at that time), to go ahead and speculate on a devaluation of the Italian Lira and the British Pound. Germany had enjoyed a boost from the integration of Eastern Germany, which, partially due…

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