the Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday announced a temporary change to its supplementary leverage ratio rule. The change would exclude U.S. Treasury securities and deposits at Federal Reserve Banks from the calculation of the rule for holding companies, and will be in effect until March 31, 2021.
Liquidity conditions in Treasury markets have deteriorated rapidly, and financial institutions are receiving significant inflows of customer deposits along with increased reserve levels. The regulatory restrictions that accompany this balance sheet growth may constrain the firms' ability to continue to serve as financial intermediaries and to provide credit to households and businesses. The change to the supplementary leverage ratio will mitigate the effects of those restrictions and better enable firms to support the economy.
To ease strains in the Treasury market resulting from the coronavirus and increase banking organizations’ ability to provide credit to households and businesses, @federalreserve announces a temporary change to its supplementary leverage ratio rule: https://t.co/PICcr9V0Ue— Federal Reserve (@federalreserve) April 1, 2020
Lessons from Alibaba and JD.com.The difference between Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos.
Now is the time for major corporations to make good on their commitments.Coronavirus Is Putting Corporate Social Responsibility to the Test
How AI, genomics, and automation are powering biotech breakthroughs....
Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner for the Americas at Softbank’s Vision Fund, tells Azeem Azhar why biotech is the next trillion-dollar market, and what breakthroughs to expect....
Today is Wednesday and I have been tied up a lot with various meetings – all on-line these days. I don’t enjoy them as much as face-to-face, given that I spent a considerable part of each day in front of my computer or with my head in books and so the human contact is a welcome variation. But needs must, as they say. Anyway, just a few snippets today, being Wednesday. I can say that in between all this Zooming and writing, I have now nearly put together a complete on-line learning system which I am now trialling. This will be the support platform for – MMTed – which I hope to make operational sometime in the coming months. One of the issues that I touched on yesterday, which is now starting to crawl out of the slime, is the “what will happen to all the debt when the crisis is over” story. And, it is not just a narrative being promoted by the Right or the conservatives. The Federal Labour Party spokespersons and those hanging around the edges have started to push the narrative. As the Prime Minister told us the other day in relation to the people who are panic buying “Stop it! It’s Ridiculous!” I think he was actually talking about those (morons) who are starting the deficit hysteria before the deficits have even actually risen much. For their own health, I urge them to “stop it”. Imagine how apoplectic they are all going to be once the deficit goes to 10 per cent or more and the RBA is buying up all the debt. My god....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
CNBC
- China on Tuesday said the official Purchasing Manager’s Index for March was 52.0, beating expectations for an economy hit by the coronavirus outbreak.
- Analysts polled by Reuters had expected the official PMI to come in at 45 for the month of March, from a record low of 35.7 a month earlier.
"The Chinese government will not just stand by and watch Huawei be slaughtered on the chopping board," Chairman Eric Xu told reporters at the launch of Huawei's annual report.
"Why wouldn't the Chinese government ban the use of 5G chips or 5G chip-powered base stations, smartphones and other smart devices provided by American companies, for cybersecurity reasons?"
(Note: This was NOT a "stimulus" package, this was disaster relief).Calculated Risk
However, the furor over the mistreatment of Dr. Lin did largely manage to skip over the question of how TeamHealth [owned by Blackstone] is even legally in the position to effectively provide hospital services when they are not licensed to do so. Several groups protested Dr. Lin’s ouster and one, the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, focused squarely on this issue.Similar to insurance companies approving and denying care prescribed by physicians. Screwing with provision is one thing but practicing medicine without a license is another.
The buzz-word at the moment in Australian government and policy circles is ‘hibernation’ – the government is hoping, that the economy can behave like a crocodile and find some ‘river bank’ and have a ‘good sleep’ until the pandemic is over, at which time, it will burst forth into a new growth phase and unless the virus mutates into something worse in the meantime then all will be well. Their policy interventions to date – while they have been like dragging a chain as their conservative instincts are being dragged very quickly into the demands and realities of real world macroeconomics, which is different to the nonsense that is taught by mainstream economists in our now depleted universities – have been crafted to ensure nothing important changes in a structural sense in our socio-economic lives. The problem is that the existing system, which they are hoping to put into hibernation for a while, is putrid to the core and needs major changes if we are to achieve a socio-ecological transformation. Remember the failings of neoliberalism? Remember climate change? Remember the poles melting? Remember the engineered cuts to workers who rely on penalty rates at weekends to maintain a sense of material prosperity? Remember the 13.7 per cent labour underutilisation rate? Remember the failed public transport and energy sectors, privatised and lacking in investment? Remember the financial markets that were exposed by the recent Royal Commission as corrupt, inefficient and downright dangerous to the our material and psychological prosperity? We don’t need a hibernation. We need the Government to take advantage of the dislocation that is currently occurring to make some basic changes. Like wiping out the gig economy. Like … read on. At present, the stimulus interventions, which are mostly about saving capitalism from itself. We should be demanding much more....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Trump would have to make a strategic offer that Russia could not resist to get some cooperation on oil prices.…But what strategic offer could Trump make that would move Putin to agree to some new deal?...
And what reason has Russia to believe that Trump or his successor would stick to any deal? As the U.S. is non-agreement-capable it has none.
The outcome of the phone call will therefore likely be nothing....Moon of Alabama
My base case view matches what is priced into the markets: the crude oil market is glutted and demand is falling off a cliff. Storage constraints are in sight, and I am not seeing an immediate catalyst for a demand rebound. The nearly inevitable outcome is that drilling drops dead, and capacity is shuttered. At some point, one will be able to take the chart of U.S. crude liquid products (conventional oil plus the products of fracking), stick a red line through the maximum value, and all other values on the chart will below that maximum. In common parlance, this behaviour is known as a "peak." As a long-suffering card-carrying Peak Oil believer, I will be flooding the internet with "I told ya so!" missives.
I accept that one can generate some scenarios where a peak does not occur near this point. Meanwhile, I am not saying that this will be a maximum for all time; this is a "local maximum." However, I am not incredibly optimistic that the U.S. will be able to take another run at the 20 million barrels per day level any time soon....US oil production depends on the cartel to maintain prices above market price owing to the high production cost of US oil relative to other major producers. The US as swing producer was never going to happen.
