Markets Matter, Money Matters...
US vice president JD Vance has said in public that he does not think the dollar s reserve currency status is good for the United States. Back in 2023 JD Vance said this: I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America. I think there is [ ]
A couple of days ago, on 1 August, Brad Setser posted that The Economist had picked a good week for a currency cover, and that the Big Mac index agreed with his own work in putting the yuan around 30% undervalued. I replied. Setser is the Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign [ ]
Second-quarter GDP figures arrived this week for both the US and the euro area, and the coverage has been almost entirely about a single number. US real GDP grew at an annualised rate of 1.5% in the second quarter, down from 2.1% in the first, and it came in weaker than the euro area, which [ ]
If you look at the financial markets, you can read what investors are thinking about the economic outlook are the shocks positive or negative, and are they supply or demand shocks? Over the past week three things have happened, all of which may have moved the markets: The first event is a positive supply [ ]
“If he’s alive or dead it doesn’t matter. If he’s dead, just prop him up and put some dark glasses on him like, like ‘Weekend at Bernie’s.’” That was John McCain on Alan Greenspan in 2007, about a year and a half after Greenspan had stepped down as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The joke [ ]
Kevin Warsh s first press conference as Fed chairman was far better than I expected. The statement is shorter, forward guidance is gone, and the Committee has promised to deliver price stability. That is most of the prescription I have made for at least fifteen years. But the question that actually matters what the Fed [ ]
Trump says Powell has been too tight. The data says the opposite. Powell has run the easiest monetary policy in modern Fed history, and the credibility cost is what makes the institution so vulnerable today Later today the Federal Open Market Committee will almost certainly leave its target range for the federal funds rate unchanged [ ]
The chief executives of the world s most powerful artificial intelligence companies have been saying remarkable things about the future of work. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has warned, in multiple interviews, that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next few years. Sam Altman of OpenAI has spoken of AI agents joining [ ]
Regular readers of this blog will know that most of what I do here is explain, analyse, and argue about macroeconomics, monetary policy, and increasingly artificial intelligence. That work is public and free and I intend to keep it that way. But over the past year, we have increasingly been asked through PAICE, [ ]
Blue Owl is one of Wall Street’s big names in private credit – a manager of nearly $300 billion in assets. The company’s logo is an owl: the animal that, according to legend, can see everything, even in the dark. On February 19, 2026, Blue Owl restricted withdrawals from one of its retail-focused funds and [ ]