For almost a decade, the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policies have created an incentive to borrow dollars. This creates a demand for dollars, basically the world is short dollars. Contrary to the wishes of Donald Trump, this is now putting a lot of upward pressure on the dollar. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:
Welcome to the Dollar Rally to end all rallies. This week’s action in the U.S. dollar puts paid all of the moves by the Fed and the ECB over the past three months to forestall this from coming.
First it was January’s FOMC meeting where the Fed completely reversed course after a very unpopular December rate hike threw equity markets into a tailspin by Christmas.
Of course our Narcissist-in-Chief thought it was all about him and implored the Fed to stop raising rates. It was interfering with his ability to shake down the world at his sanctions and tariffs party.
But it wasn’t about him at all. It was about the Fed’s need to normalize rates into a coming global slowdown after a central-bank-induced, decade-long recovery of dubious merit.
They’d done their job of recapitalizing the banks, somewhat, and now it was time to start trying to address the massive pension system and municipal bond crisis that was on the horizon.
Or at least that’s what they thought.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 