Authored by Patrick Watson via MauldinEconomics.com,
According to the more cynical pundits, government programs usually achieve the opposite of their intended goal. And sometimes they do.
For example, Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” is still in progress, but the drugs are definitely winning.
One lesson from the 2007-08 crisis was that the vast majority of financial market participants, never mind the general public, were unfamiliar with subprime mortgages until the crisis was underway. Even now, we doubt many have much understanding of repo, the divergence between LIBOR and Fed Funds from 9 August 2007 and Eurodollar liquidity.
One wonders if the Fed ever reads the reports issued by the Office of Financial Stability, which does a surprisingly good job of laying out the risks facing the market at any one time, which incidentally are far greater than various Fed presidents would care to admit.
When it comes to job creation in the United States, President Trump will be displeased to hear the latest findings from Quartz: 170,000 fewer retail jobs in 2017 - and 75,000 more Amazon robots.
The state of Illinois is a financial disaster that will undoubtedly be forced into bankruptcy at some point in the future. As we've pointed out multiple times over the past several months, the state faces a staggering $130 billion funding gap on its public pensions, a mountain of debt and $16.4 billion in accrued payables because they can't even afford to pay their bills on a timely basis. Here are just a couple of our recent posts on these topics: