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Currencies In Crisis
Market participants should expect significant additional hand-wringing in the new week about the outlook for the euro, pound and yen, all of which have come under enormous pressure in the face of an inexorably stronger dollar and rapidly deteriorating fundamentals.
The yen will remain in the limelight as traders, on tenterhooks, ponder a possible intervention to stem a harrowing slide that's upended traditional correlations and threatens to undermine public support for the Bank of Japan's prolo
Maybe I’m suffering from the Meno Dilemma but the Europeans are definitely pro Ukraine and willing to suffer for them. Anyway. We as a human race should make every effort to reduce energy consumption in every way we can.
However amazing it seems now, when OPEC shut off our oil and we began rationing in 1973, in the next two years Americans managed to reduce the amount of energy required to create a dollar’s worth of GDP by 50%! Moreover, we kept that number down for roughly a decade. An astonishing effort at energy conservation that would not be unwelcome again.
Now I’ll have Sammy Hagar’s ‘I Can’t Drive 55’ lyrics playing in my head for the rest of the day.
I’m looking at the best ways to build up JPY cash holdings. An annoyance are the annual Treasury Dept disclosure reports, which wd suggest offshore ETF exposure is the way to go. But as 2024 rolls closer, the idea of having real cash rather than a derivative starts to look more appealing.
If Russia looks like it is losing badly, Putin will either be overthrown by some faction or will lash out or both. Nato may be forced to intervene. For all we know, the generals and intelligence services in Russia may be quietly speaking right now. You have to believe that some sort of reparation regime for Russia to benefit Ukraine is being discussed right now as well by Western powers. If the west is smart and that comes to pass, they would be wise to make reparations not too onerous. There also will be a reckoning for war atrocities at some point.
I hope what you’re saying about Russia and Ukraine is true. It would be nice for Ukraine and anyone who cares about their country if Putin is overthrown. He’s a great burden on his own country, and Ukraine, and every other country in the world.
re.: reparations
Who would’ve thought that a time might come to dust off the old copy of Keynes’ “economic consequences of the peace”.
Should the war in Ukraine end (hopefully sooner rather than later) the reckoning (not only for war crimes) ought to be epic.
My guess for the next escalation: high altitude dumb-bombing of urban areas. Kharkiv seems a likely target. Putin probably thinks the West can’t make things any worse for Russia, and it’s only different from things that have already been done to Ukraine in magnitude. Dresden-lite.
My 77 year old brain is no longer agile enough to easily figure this out, but the BoJ’s excursion into market support has resulted in the accumulation of something like half (?) of the outstanding Japanese equities. If that is true, what effect has the Yen’s precipitous decline had on the bank’s effective portfolio value?