‘The Clocks Stopped At 1:17’…

Ok, get ready.

For now, the fiscal-chaos-can has been kicked, Harvey is behind us, and North Korea’s latest nuclear test has come and gone.

But dead ahead is Irma’s landfall in Florida, North Korea’s “founding day” (which by most accounts will be “celebrated” with an ICBM launch), and of course, more gridlock in D.C. We are, figuratively and literally, in the eye of the storm on Friday.

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Nosebleed.

The other possibility here is that by persisting in this, we’re exhausting our capacity to respond to future crises. Of course, if one waits around long enough, another crisis is bound to occur. When that happens not only will we be short on ammunition (e.g. if the next crisis started tomorrow, we’d be going into it from ZIRP/NIRP and with already bloated CB balance sheets), we’ll also be approaching it from nosebleed levels thanks largely to the fact that we never exited the state of exception instituted to cope with the previous crisis.

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Death By A Thousand Cuts.

The bottom line is that between another powerful hurricane approaching the U.S. mainland, U.S. markets catching up with their global counterparts in terms of pricing in North Korea after the long weekend, the DACA decision which portends more bickering in Washington, and the looming debt ceiling debate (with the specter of a technical default showing up in today’s decidedly poor 4-week bill auction), it was death by a thousand cuts.

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