The Institutional Risk Analyst

There are literally dozens of banks in the US made insolvent by the policy moves of the FOMC over the past year.

The cult of ever falling interest rates goes back 50 years and spans the terms of Fed chairs back to Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker...

As the scale of Fed open market operations grew since 2008, volatility has increased, rendering the adjustment from QE to QT problematic

Xi Jinping in China and Putin in Russia have turned their backs on the global economy to retain power

If you consider QE “stimulus” inflationary, then Fed policy actually accelerated inflation in the November-January period.

Amidst the yelling and screaming of Elizabeth Warren, we suspect that Jay Powell will survive the crisis

When Treasury market yields trade and stay negative, look for the Federal Reserve Board to come to the rescue of MM funds and banks.

Last week we posted a snippet from Rob Chrisman’s housing finance blog about former Fed Chair Janet’s Yellen being "puzzled" due to the lack of home ownership by Millennials. The ensuing reaction was an order of magnitude above our normal level of discourse, leading us to think that there is a raw nerve among Americans when it comes to home prices.

Financials are overvalued – still. When JPM peaked at just shy of $120 per share on February 26th of this year, the market leader was trading just shy of 2x book value. The stock is still up 15% over the past six months vs single digits for the S&P 500. JPM has single digit equity returns and no real growth in terms of revenue. Hit the bid.

Count the numbers of markets and economic indicators currently at extreme valuations and positive correlations. Financial markets showed a glimmer of normality last week when stock prices fell and bonds rose. The surprise expressed by market participants is an illustration of just how long investors have been dealing with a market where all manner of assets are correlated and at multi-year highs. We talked about this last week with our friends at BNN in Toronto in a TV hit f

Large Cap Financials & Asset Inflation

While WFC may be the object of scorn, its operations continue pretty much as before. As we told SquawkBox a week ago, having WFC trading at a discount to JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) is not a normal state of affairs. The former has better nominal as well as risk adjusted returns than JPM on most days, but of late WFC senior management has been slicing off figurative fingers and toes in a stunning display of reputational self-destruction.

Chair Yellen Spills the Punch Bowl

Banks and the Fed's Duration Trap

The Yellen Put & Market Risk

Last week financials continued their relentless march toward the sky as investors chased the happy prospect of higher interest rates from the Federal Open Market Committee and maybe even tax cuts from Congress. In a world with too much debt and regulation, and too little economic growth as a result, driving financials (and all other asset classes) up to valuations not seen since the roaring 2000s is a fool’s errand, especially when you notice that credit spreads remain large

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.”

"[F]rom early spring throughout 2009 and until mid-year 2010, the Fed engaged in the first major quantitative easing program of purchases of government agency debt and agency-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities. The Fed’s purchases reached a cumulative total of $1.285 trillion, and excess reserves reached nearly $1 trillion. Essentially, the new reserves provided by the purchases program enabled the banking system to fund the repayment of about $1 trillion of various forms

April 6, 2017 | JPMorgan (JPM) boss Jamie Dimon says there’s something wrong with the US economy and he is obviously right. Here’s our short list: * too much public and private debt * too little income and growth * monopolies in banking and other industries * oppressive regulation for all businesses * political muddle and lack of national purpose * confused, irrational monetary policy A couple of weeks before Mr. Dimon was waxing effusive on the state of the American pol