The Institutional Risk Analyst

Q: What is the duration of a security with a negative yield? Hold that thought. Noted financial author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has little...

Avalon | We caused a bit of a fuss last week on CNBC by suggesting that the Federal Open Market Committee will not cut the target for Fed...

In this issue of The Institutional Risk Analyst, we feature a comment by Robert Eisenbeis, Ph.D., Vice Chairman & Chief Monetary...

New York | Last week in The Institutional Risk Analyst, we gave you a taste of today’s interview with author and consultant Jim Rickards...

New York | In this issue of The Institutional Risk Analyst, we feature a market comment from Robert Eisenbeis, Vice Chairman & Chief...

New York | In the most recent edition of The IRA Bank Book, we note that the rate of increase in funding costs for US banks in 2018 was a...

San Francisco | In this issue of The Institutional Risk Analyst, we feature a conversation with David Kotok, Chairman and Chief...

Paris | Those of us who anticipated a quiet holiday break have been greatly disappointed. It is tempting to blame the electronic...

By any standard, credit spreads in the US bond and loan markets remain very tight. Now several years into a Fed interest rate tightening...

In this issue of The Institutional Risk Analyst, we feature a comment from our fellow fisherman David Kotok, Chairman & Chief Investment...

"Al", retired Wells Fargo stagecoach pony New York | Wall Street more than bounced last week as the secular shortage of stocks quickly...

New York | With the global punditry assembled in Davos this week, the topic of the dollar seems to have bubbled to the surface again. ...

In this issue of The Institutional Risk Analyst, let’s first ponder last week’s revelations that the European Central Bank is taking a...

Atlanta | Is a conundrum worse than a dilemma? One of the more important and least discussed factors affecting the financial markets is...

Trump Pavilion from the Van Wyck Expressway New York | Q: Besides stocks, what asset class has benefitted the most from the radical...

In this issue, The Institutional Risk Analyst looks at the most recent bank portfolio data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp for Q2 2017 to see what it says about asset prices and inflation. For some quarters now, the credit statistics for the $16 trillion asset banking system has been too good to be true, in some cases suggesting that credit events have no cost. The last time that this circumstances existed was the mid-2000s, when several large mortgage banks were re

In fact, since WWII home prices in the US have gone up four times the official inflation rate. “Houses weren't always this expensive,” notes CNBC. “In 1940, the median home value in the U.S. was just $2,938. In 1980, it was $47,200, and by 2000, it had risen to $119,600. Even adjusted for inflation, the median home price in 1940 would only have been $30,600 in 2000 dollars, according to data from the U.S. Census.”

May 29, 2017 | In the mid 2000s, just before the financial crisis began, US banks were reporting credit metrics for all asset classes in loan portfolios that were quite literally too good to be true. And they were. The cost of bad credit decisions was hidden, for a time, by rising asset prices. The same aggressive, low-rate environment used by the Fed to artificially stoke growth in the early 2000s has been repeated in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, only to a greater e