March 4, 2025
One of my recent projects with Spring Creek Web Design has been building an options trading log. You can check it out over at IotaTradingLog.com soon. Almost everyone has a friend, family member, or acquaintance who got sucked into financial markets during 2020-21, and the explosion in retail participation is evident in the data. See […]
Read moreJanuary 17, 2025
The Bank of Japan (BoJ) doesn’t have any recent experience with raising interest rates. Since the legendary bubble of the late 80’s popped rates have been on a one way street to zero, until recently (Chart 1). A similar phenomenon has been experienced in the United States as well. Volker raising rates to break the […]
Read moreJanuary 7, 2025
The foundation of every economy is the people, at least for now. Economic data at it’s core is modeling the actions of individuals and corporate actors, GDP is the measure of goods and services output by a country’s people, and inflation is a metric of how much money people are spending on goods and services. […]
Read moreDecember 30, 2024
Newly appointed Bank of Japan (BoJ) governor, Ueda Kazuo has guided the bank through a year marked with moderate inflation, Yen depreciation, and the end of negative interest rates in Japan. Governor Ueda seems intent on shrinking the BoJ balance sheet. In the past twelve months the bank has stopped buying ETFs and JREITs, decreased […]
Read moreDecember 11, 2024
I’m taking a departure from the Japan focused writing to focus on some financial engineering history. German ‘MEFO’ bills were instrumental in re-arming Nazi Germany without technically violating the Treaty of Versailles or causing widespread price inflation. The careful issuance of MEFO bills by central bank president Schacht was the catalyst to restart German industry […]
Read moreNovember 25, 2024
How the Bank of Japan has acted post US election. Almost three weeks ago Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Unsurprisingly, global markets reacted. Would they have reacted differently had Harris won? Hard to say. It is undebatable that JGB yields have slide back into the brown zone – a confusing place […]
Read moreOctober 31, 2024
This post will center around the data wrangling required to create a comprehensive database of BOJ JGB holding reports (2001 – present). I don’t do this professionally, though maybe(?) I would enjoy it, so don’t expect best practices here. The methods used to download, clean, combine, and check data are described below. To start, let’s […]
Read moreOctober 23, 2024
A little over a month ago I wrote Room to Breathe, a piece in which I noted how the recent Yen strength and 10-year JGB demand was making things easy for the MOF & BOJ. In the same piece I also predicted that the Yen would continue to strengthen as JGB/UST spreads narrow due to […]
Read moreOctober 2, 2024
When someone tells you something is wrong, they’re probably right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re probably wrong. Recently there has been a lot of attention on the relatively weak Japanese Yen, few deny this is a problem for Japanese savers, consumers, and thus politicians. The range of remedies prescribed by politicians, […]
Read moreSeptember 28, 2024
Common and fungible things are often considered boring due to the fact they are common and fungible. As a general rule people’s interest in something increases with the rarity, and things that are unique get studied and coveted by the richest and smartest in society. Commodities fall into the common and fungible, thus boring, invisible, […]
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