When World’s Central Banks Get It Wrong, Guess Who Pays The Price😂😹🤣 (#GotBitcoin)

“I believe, a devastating blow has been dealt to the credibility of all central banks — eventually the world’s citizens will realize that the inflation we face is ‘man-made,’ and central banks have played an instrumental role,” Joker. When World’s Central Banks Get It Wrong, Guess Who Pays The Price😂😹🤣 (#GotBitcoin)

And The Great Monetary Experiment Continues

Nevertheless, continuing to expand their balance sheets in 2021 and to keep rates near zero even as inflation soared and economies recovered from the depths of the Covid-19 crisis now looks to have helped sow the seeds of current turmoil.

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Ultimate Resource On Central Bank Digital Currencies (#GotBitcoin)

The blunders by monetary mavens tarnish a reputation of ensuring price stability and preventing the kind of inflationary spiral that hammered middle-class incomes in the 1970s. The loss of credibility means even greater policy action may be needed to defuse price pressures.

The US Isn’t The Only One Facing A Credibility Challenge

Lagarde and her colleagues are now on course to raise rates by a quarter point in July and 50 basis points in September.

That’s after Lagarde said in December it would be unlikely there would be any tightening this year.

“All international institutions, all forecasters of repute have actually made the same mistake” of underestimating the crisis, Lagarde said last week.

For Many, Polls Are Showing Evidence Of Public Loss Of Confidence:

* A Gallup survey released in May showed just 43% of those polled had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence Powell would do the right thing for the US economy. While not the lowest among recent Fed chiefs, it’s well under the 74% Alan Greenspan got in the early 2000s.

* For the first time on record, more people were dissatisfied than satisfied with the performance of the Bank of England when it comes to controlling prices, a quarterly BOE survey showed.

* BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has seen his popularity slump after he said consumers were becoming more tolerant of rising prices. A Kyodo News survey published Monday found 59% deemed him unfit for the job.

Stanley Druckenmiller, who runs Duquesne Family Office, this month warned that because central bank policy a year ago was totally inappropriate, it’s inevitable that investors will lose money.

“If you’re predicting a soft landing, it’s going against decades of history,” said Druckenmiller, 68, who managed money for billionaire George Soros for more than a decade.

* Policy Makers Are Now Moving Much Faster Than Telegraphed
* Fed And Peers Hope To Contain Long-Term Inflation Expectations

Even after central banks recognized they got their inflation calls wrong last year, they’ve continued to flub their policy guidance, threatening greater damage to their credibility, roiling markets and undermining the pandemic recovery.

The Federal Reserve is now expected to hike interest rates by 75 basis points Wednesday, just weeks after Chair Jerome Powell and his team repeatedly advertised a half percentage point move. It’s the latest in a series of misfires, from deeming high inflation “transitory” last year to speeding up the end of its bond-purchase program to accelerating the runoff of its bond portfolio.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has lately also turned more hawkish than she previously indicated, and the Reserve Bank of Australia is among those raising rates faster than policy makers had signaled.

Investors are casting judgment as they fret that the race to make up for past forecasting errors raises the risk of recessions.

Global stocks have entered a bear market, US Treasury yields on Monday posted their biggest two-day jump since the 1980s and credit markets are showing signs of increasing stress.

Dramatic bond-market moves forced the ECB to hold an emergency Governing Council session Wednesday, after which the panel pledged to accelerate work on a new tool to address surging yields in some euro-zone member countries.

The ECB ought to have signaled that plan already at its scheduled meeting last week, in the view of some critics.

“This is a relatively quick course-correction, but there is a cost in that the hurdle for market credibility is higher now the ECB is moving reactively rather than proactively,” Krishna Guha head of central bank strategy at Evercore ISI, wrote in a note.

Anchors Aweigh

“Central banks are in a dilemma,” said Sayuri Shirai, a former Bank of Japan board member who’s now a Keio University professor. “To restore confidence, central banks need to raise policy rates” sufficiently to bring down inflation, and that “may lead to a further slowdown in the economic recovery,” she said.

Belief among households and companies that central banks will succeed in meeting their inflation goals over time helps to moderate price pressures. Households might hold off on some purchases, confident some prices will come down in time. And workers would be less likely to embed cost-of-living compensation demands in wage talks.

Policy makers until recently highlighted that long-term inflation expectations were contained — a testament to their credibility.

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans explained in March that current-day inflation wasn’t like the 1980s because “overly accommodative monetary policy” in the 1960s and 1970s had contributed to a buildup of long-term inflation expectations.

Friday’s University of Michigan gauge of longer-term price expectations showed a major crack in that narrative, jumping to the highest since a 2008 oil-price spike.

The Fed, ECB and its peers can’t be blamed for failing to anticipate the price surges stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or, arguably, the duration of global supply-chain challenges.

When World’s Central Banks Get It Wrong, Guess Who Pays The Price😂😹🤣 (#GotBitcoin)

Powell took until November to “retire” the description of inflation as “transitory” and last month acknowledged that with “hindsight then, yes, it probably would’ve been better to have raised rates earlier.”

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a consistent Fed critic since early 2021, blasted US central bank forecasters’ March expectations for inflation as “delusional when issued.”

The Fed’s preferred price gauge rose an annual 6.3% in April. The median estimate of Fed officials in March was for 4.3% for 2022. Fresh forecasts are due Wednesday.

RBA Governor Philip Lowe in May said it was “embarrassing” that his previous policy guidance that rates would remain at a record-low until 2024 had proved so wrong.

Among emerging markets, there’s a mixed picture. Some, like Brazil, hiked much faster than developed nations. China has instead focused on offering monetary support amid an economic slowdown.

But in India, the central bank pushed back against suggestions they were behind the curve as recently as April, only to then go on to raise its key interest rate two months in a row. Inflation, meantime, remains well outside its tolerance zone.

Updated: 6-17-2022

The Fed Is Still Struggling To Get Its Story Straight

Organizing its discussion of policy around a projected path for interest rates only makes its job harder.

Much as I sympathize with the Federal Reserve as it grapples with an economy in extremely trying circumstances, I believe it could be doing better in one crucial respect: helping financial markets to align their expectations with its thinking.

Analysts could be forgiven for saying that the Fed just aligned itself with them, rather than the other way around. It raised its policy rate by 75 basis points this week, not by the 50 points previously advertised.

After the unexpectedly high inflation figure for the year to May was published last week, analysts abruptly called for a bigger rate increase. The Fed, reversing its earlier guidance, duly delivered. You might wonder, who’s in charge?

To be clear, if financial markets were merely anticipating the policy rate demanded by changing financial conditions, given the Fed’s understanding of its job, that would be fine. Actually, if markets were pre-aligning themselves with policy makers’ declared ends and means, that would be ideal: The Fed does its job, and the markets help by correctly predicting its judgements.

At the moment, though, any such interpretation is quite a stretch — because the supporting analysis, from Fed and commentators alike, betrays confusion over those very ends and means.

Consider the obsessive focus, ahead of the announcement, on whether the policy rate should rise by 50 or 75 basis points. In itself, that margin is of vanishingly small economic significance. It matters only because of all the other things it might or might not say about the Fed’s calculations.

Has the central bank changed its understanding of the processes driving inflation — on the basis, by the way, of very little new information?

Has it changed how it balances its dual mandate — that is, does it now care more about lowering inflation than about maintaining high employment? (If so, why?) Has it changed the timeframe over which it proposes to get inflation back under control, or about the projected policy rates needed to get inflation down as originally intended, or both?

The answer to all these questions is, who knows? And it’s little short of absurd that the choice between 50 and 75 basis points raises them in the first place. All by itself, that ought to tell the Fed that its messaging is failing — and making a difficult job even harder.

Current monetary policy has to contend with two fundamental problems. The first is a series of unprecedentedly large and complex supply shocks. The other is a legacy policy framework that was (arguably) well-suited to persistently less-than-target inflation but is badly suited to these new conditions.

If inflation is caused by surging demand, reducing demand is the right remedy; to the extent it’s caused by sudden and temporary restrictions of supply, reducing demand is a mistake. Compounding this difficulty, the Fed is still yoked to a model of “forward guidance” that calls attention to the future path of interest rates more than to the future path of demand.

This made sense when the policy rate was zero and needed to fall further, because the Fed thought promising “low for longer” was the best it could do.

This “zero lower bound” no longer applies. Yet the Fed is still in forward-guidance mode, tightening policy with an extra quarter of a point and telling markets to look at the projected path of rates over the coming year — all the while emphasizing the need to watch the data and reserving the right to pivot without notice if necessary.

Well, which is it? Monetary policy is complicated, but it doesn’t need to be quite so self-contradictory. The remedy for both problems — the outsize role of supply shocks and the confusion over forward guidance — is to explain policy in terms of current and projected aggregate demand.

In effect, this allows the Fed to be agnostic about short-term changes in productive capacity, and lets inflation rise temporarily above target when supply conditions worsen.

In addition, it directs attention away from the expected path of interest rates. Meeting by meeting, the question for the Fed’s policymakers will be this: What should the interest rate be now, not six months or a year from now, to push forecast demand on to the right track?

That’s a difficult question, to be sure. And the answer to it will change as data comes in. It bears repeating: Nothing can make monetary policy easy. But there’d be less confusion, less attention to things that don’t matter, and less delay in adjusting policy, if the Fed stopped organizing its announcements around a projected path for its policy rate.

Things can change suddenly. The Fed can’t say what the appropriate interest rate will be over the course of the next two years. And if the outlook for demand should shift abruptly, in either direction, the interest rate should shift abruptly, too.

On Wednesday, Chairman Jerome Powell rightly stressed the need to stay nimble. Forward guidance on interest rates is the opposite of nimble. The Fed’s approach to messaging needs to change.

Federal Reserve Board: Recent Market Turmoil Shows ‘Structural Fragilities’ of Crypto

The report is a preview of Fed chair Jerome Powell’s testimony in Congress next week.

The Federal Reserve Board has released its twice-yearly monetary policy report, noting that “recent strains experienced in markets for stablecoins…and other digital assets have highlighted the structural fragilities in that rapidly growing sector.”

* The report is a preview of Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s testimony in Congress next week. Powell is expected to outline the Fed’s plans to combat inflation. This week, Powell announced a 75-basis point rise in short-term interest rates, the largest increase in 28 years.

* The report, which is submitted to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, elaborated on how “generally, stablecoins that are not backed by safe and sufficiently liquid assets and are not subject to appropriate regulatory standards create risks to investors and potentially to the financial system, including susceptibility to potentially destabilizing runs.”

* The TerraUSD stablecoin collapsed in dramatic fashion last month, functionally losing all of its value. The report pointed to the “concentrated nature” of the stablecoin sector in which Tether, USD Coin and Binance USD constituted more than 80 percent of the total market value, growing rapidly over the past year to more than $180 billion in March 2022.

* According to the report, “these vulnerabilities may be exacerbated by a lack of transparency regarding the riskiness and liquidity of assets backing stablecoins.”

* The report added that the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have all made recommendations to address prudential risks posed by stablecoins.

Updated: 6-22-2022

The Age of Credibility For Central Banks Is Over

Inflation blunders have destroyed the trust that’s anchored the global financial system since the end of the gold standard.

Monetary regimes don’t fall often. Half a century ago, in 1971, Richard Nixon ended the Age of Gold by formally eliminating the dollar’s peg to the precious metal. Since then, the dollar and other currencies have rested on fiat—they’re worth something because governments say they are.

You could call this the Age of Credibility. In place of gold, currency’s anchor is the trust in the central banks that issue them. Now credibility appears to be at an end. With central banks desperately ripping up their playbooks to try to rein in inflation that’s veered far beyond target, they’re admitting they’ve been wrong, and giving up on trying to steer the markets on their plans for the future.

That’s alarming, because the precedent of the 1970s is not encouraging. Oil briefly took over from gold as the anchor for currencies, and the world suffered through a period of protracted stagflation. The new Age of Credibility arrived courtesy of Paul Volcker, who as chairman of the Federal Reserve raised rates repeatedly at the turn of the ’80s and managed to squeeze inflation out of the system.

For the four decades since, central bankers’ credibility has been the anchor. Provided everyone trusts central bankers to do what it takes to protect the buying power of the money, fiat currencies can work.

A credible central bank doesn’t even need to act—mere words are usually enough to keep markets in line. In late 1996, Fed Chair Alan Greenspan provoked a stock market correction by musing about the possibility of “irrational exuberance” in a speech; European Central Bank President Mario Draghi halted the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis in 2012 by promising to do “whatever it takes” to save the currency, and he never needed to do anything more.

Draghi’s predecessor, Jean-Claude Trichet, even worked out his own code: If he said he was “extremely vigilant,” everyone knew that was a promise that rates would rise at the next policy meeting.

One notable feature of the Age of Credibility is that inflation stayed quiescent. From 1994 to 2021, central banks’ preferred gauge of consumer prices (excluding food and fuel) never once rose above the 3% top of the target range set in the US and the euro zone. Japanese inflation was far lower.

But now it’s time to ask whether low inflation was the result of central banks’ credibility or rather the cause of it. It may just have been a felicitous confluence of factors.

Demographics were favorable, with working-age populations growing and saving for the future; globalization—notably China’s insertion into the global market—held down labor costs; commodity prices stayed under control in comparison with the 1970s, with only a brief interruption when a bull market in oil turned into a price spike in the pre-crisis summer of 2008. In such an environment, inflation wasn’t difficult to tame.

Also, crucially, it was almost costless to bail out the markets with lower rates in a crisis. When Draghi promised to do whatever it took, he meant that he was prepared to cut rates, or buy government bonds, or take other actions that would normally stoke inflation. With Europe battling a deflationary slump, he could do this. That no longer holds true.

Also absent for decades: aggressive fiscal policy. Expansive Keynesian investment programs went out of favor in the early 1980s, and in the Western world there were increasingly vocal calls for balanced budgets. With elected governments generally trying to avoid what were pejoratively known as “tax-and-spend” policies, all the more weight was placed on central banks and their credibility.

That approach has been fraying for years. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the central banking commitment effectively became one of not allowing stock prices to fall too much; and the 2008 financial crisis ushered in a decade when central bank credibility hinged on keeping bond yields low and trying to raise inflation, not lower it.

The pandemic-induced surge in prices has laid waste to central bankers’ credibility. The Fed and its peers around the world badly misjudged the path inflation would take, initially dismissing it as “transitory.” After a series of bad calls, they can no longer confidently guide the markets on their next steps. So they’ve given up.

June saw Fed Chair Jerome Powell reverse confident guidance that a 0.75 percentage-point rate increase was “not on the table” and hike them by 0.75 percentage point. Also in June, ECB president Christine Lagarde had to convene an emergency meeting of policymakers less than a week after their regular conclave in response to a speculative attack on Italian government bonds.

That selloff had been triggered by the ECB’s failure earlier to address the question of how it would keep different countries’ debt in line once it begins hiking rates in July. Unlike Draghi a decade earlier, she needed to prove she had a plan to stop the region’s debt markets from fragmenting.

Elsewhere, the Bank of England appeared to promise a rate hike in November last year, shocked everyone by not delivering, and then caused just as much surprise by hiking in December. The Swiss National Bank stunned the world on June 16 not only by hiking, for the first time in more than a decade, but also by doing so by half a percentage point.

What comes next? The implicit plan of the bankers is that after some now unavoidable ’70s-like chaos, central banks will regain their credibility and order will be restored. But that’s going to be difficult to achieve. Trust in all institutions is painfully low as it is. The word of Powell or Lagarde is no longer as good as Volcker’s, and it’s certainly not as good as gold.

Central banks have lost credibility in large part because they’ve had to do too much. With elected governments unwilling or unable to take the measures that might spur growth, or to deal with crises, unelected technocrats had to fill the vacuum.

They didn’t do this willingly. The ECB dragged its feet for more than two years during the sovereign debt crisis in an attempt to force politicians to fix the euro’s structural flaws. Ben Bernanke, as Fed chairman, insisted that the Troubled Asset Relief Program bank bailout money should be voted on by Congress and not spirited into being by the central bank. But in both cases, politicians left it to bankers to sort out the mess.

Arguably, the key reason inflation returned last year was that in 2020 governments had at last resorted to stimulative spending to tide businesses and households through the worst of the pandemic—and central banks didn’t grasp that this meant they could desist from buying bonds, a policy known as quantitative easing. The Fed didn’t make its final QE purchase until March of this year, while the ECB is due to make its own final purchases this month.

With the cost of living back as a major issue, it’s become a matter for politicians to wrestle with, and not technocrats at the Fed—much as was perceived to be the case throughout the 1970s. For some it may even be a matter of survival: In the US, Republicans are wielding the word “Bidenflation” as a cudgel heading into November’s midterm elections.

Joe Biden’s administration and many other governments are looking for ways to combat inflation other than with monetary policy. And across the world populist pressure is on governments from the left and the right to take a more active role in the economy by, for instance, capping or subsidizing energy costs for households to minimize their pain in the short term.

Thus it appears that the most likely anchor to replace central bank credibility is confidence in governments. Not a comforting thought.

Updated: 1-8-2023

Central Bank’s $143 Billion Record Loss Costs Swiss Government Usual Payout😂😹🤣 #gotbitcoin

When World’s Central Banks Get It Wrong, Guess Who Pays The Price😂😹🤣 (#GotBitcoin)

Broader Trend

The 2022 loss in Switzerland is one of the most startling examples of how the global environment of rising interest rates has shifted the financial backdrop for central banks with associated fiscal consequences.

Meanwhile, Crypto Outperforms Stocks, Gold On Best Bitcoin Streak In Nearly A Year

Back To The Main Headline……

In the neighboring euro zone, national central bank governors face increasing pressure to explain why contributions to domestic public finances from their activities are ceasing. In the UK, the Bank of England is no longer paying into the public purse and instead is receiving transfers from the Treasury to cover projected losses in its bond-buying program.

* FX Holdings Drive Losses Five Times The Previous Record
* Payment To Government Skipped Only Second Time In 116 Years

Switzerland’s government will not receive a payout from the Swiss National Bank for 2022, as the central bank projects the biggest loss in its 116-year history.

The SNB expects an annual loss of about 132 billion francs ($143 billion), more than five times the previous record, it said Monday in preliminary results. The largest part of this, 131 billion francs, stems from collapsed valuations of its large pile of holdings in foreign currencies, accrued as a result of decade-long purchases to weaken the franc.

When World’s Central Banks Get It Wrong, Guess Who Pays The Price😂😹🤣 (#GotBitcoin)

The value of the SNB’s foreign-exchange reserves fell some 17% last year. As of December, it held 784 billion francs, down from 945 billion francs a year earlier. Still, the year-end number exceeds the gross domestic product of Saudi Arabia.

Positions in Swiss francs saw a valuation loss of around 1 billion francs, while the SNB earned about 400 million francs on its gold holdings.

It is only the second time since the SNB was established in 1906 that it has to skip its yearly payment to the federal government and Swiss cantons, forcing many of the 26 administrative districts to adjust their spending plans. For 2021, the institution had paid out 6 billion francs.

The conference of cantonal finance chiefs told SDA that while the loss is “regrettable,” interim earnings had suggested such an outcome.

“It’s an established fact that SNB profits fluctuate widely and distributions cannot be taken for granted,” the body was cited as saying.

The SNB’s private shareholders will not receive a dividend for 2022 either. Unlike other central banks, the Swiss institution is a publicly traded joint-stock company, with about half the shares held by the public sector and the rest by companies and private individuals.

Earnings from the SNB’s operations don’t influence monetary policy. Final results are due on March 6.

Updated: 1-9-2023

Crypto Beats Stocks, Gold On Best Bitcoin Streak In Nearly A Year

A cryptocurrency sector battered by turmoil last year is showing some signs of life early in 2023, posting bigger gains than other asset classes like stocks, bonds and gold.

The MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 100 Index of top tokens is up some 7% so far this month, exceeding advances of about 2% in global stocks, 1% in bonds and 3% from gold, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Global markets are taking heart from the possibility that central banks are closer to calling time on rapid interest-rate hikes as inflation eases from very high levels.

Some of that tentative relief has spilled over into crypto, even as the threat of further bankruptcies hangs over the industry after FTX’s collapse.

“There’s a faint heartbeat — the patient’s not dead,” said Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG Australia, referring to six straight days of increases in the Bitcoin price, the best streak since February 2022.

“Selling momentum looks exhausted and there’s a better macro environment” but the token needs to scale key technical levels like the 200-day moving average to trigger greater investor interest, Sycamore added.

Some of the sharpest crypto gains lie outside of the largest token Bitcoin. Second-ranked Ether is up 10% so far this month. Solana, a token that shed almost all its value last year because of a link to FTX’s fallen founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has added over 60% in the early days of January.

An upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain, crypto’s major commercial highway, is also engendering optimism. The upgrade, called Shanghai, may materialize in March. It will allow investors to withdraw Ether they locked up to help operate the network. The latter process is known as staking and earns rewards.

Staking Tokens

Some crypto protocols seek to provide easier and more flexible access to staking rewards, and coins linked to them have surged. Examples of such so-called liquid staking tokens include StakeWise’s SWISE, Lido DAO and Rocket Pool’s RPL, which are up 113%, 107% and 21% respectively in January, according to data from CoinGecko.

Bitcoin rose as much as 1.9% on Monday and was trading at $17,260 as of 10:56 a.m. in London, a three-week high. Solana added about 20% and Cardano 12%.

Coinbase Global Inc. and Riot Platforms Inc. led cryptocurrency-exposed stocks higher in US premarket trading amid the digital-asset bounce.

Bitcoin and the gauge of top 100 digital assets sank over 60% in 2022, hurt by sharply tightening monetary policy and a series of blowups culminating in the unraveling of the FTX exchange, which owes billions of dollars to customers.

Trading volumes crashed and volatility ebbed as investors fled, highlighting lingering worries about the risk of further bankruptcies in the contagion from the alleged fraud at FTX.

Updated: 7-10-2023

*Are We Getting To The Point Where Central Banks Are The Cause Recessions?

The TS Lombard managing director says policymakers have lost control of tightening, and that’s led to self-inflicted recessions.

Dario Perkins, Managing Director on the Global Macro team at TS Lombard, asks that question in his conversation this week with Merryn Somerset Webb on Merryn Talks Money. He says central banks are losing control of their own tools, and that policymakers are driving their economies into recession.

The good news, says Perkins, is that any upcoming recession is likely to be mild. Recessions are disinflationary, so central bankers will react by cutting rates. But that’s not good news for bonds or equities.

Perkins warns that the scary declines in equity prices in 2000 and 2008 aren’t the template this time around. There’s danger ahead if—when recessionary dynamics take hold—central bankers have yet to pivot.

However if they do shift in time, Perkins says expect the market to behave much as it did in the early 90s, when it fell 10% and then rallied hard. And that, he says, really wasn’t so bad.

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