23 Jun 2015

Save Alexander Hamilton

My favorite television show of all time was The Wire, a gritty HBO series about the hard life of the people and institutions in Baltimore, from cops and drug dealers to longshoremen, politicians, lawyers and middle school kids. When the US Treasury announced last week that they intend to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill in 2020 with an important woman in American History, my first thought was about… Read More

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15 Jun 2015

The IMF in the Spotlight

The ongoing debt crisis in Greece has put the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the spotlight.  For a lot of people, the question is, what is the IMF? I struggle with the answer as well.  My neighbor across the street worked for either the IMF or the World Bank, but I always get mixed up because all of these supranational organizations sound the same to me. As a Columbian national,… Read More

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12 Jun 2015

What Drives Long Run Economic Growth?

It’s Friday in the summertime, so I thought I would do something a little light and easy today. I was reading an article by a St. Louis Federal Reserve economist titled ‘What Drives Long-Run Economic Growth?‘ I’ve been writing about short-term economic issues like the impact of the cold weather on the first quarter and when the Fed might raise interest rates (June, September or January?), so the long-run idea was appealing. The author,… Read More

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2 Jun 2015

Where is GDP Headed?

As noted in yesterday’s Daily Insights, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the first quarter was pretty bad – we actually contracted at an annualized rate of -0.7 percent.  As bad as that is (and it’s pretty bad), it’s actually better than the first quarter of last year, which saw an annualized contraction of -2.1 percent. Last year, we could blame the drop in output on the polar vortex that made… Read More

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24 Mar 2015

ALM Insights – March 2015

ALM Insights is focused on banks and other institutions that use their portfolio to manage risk on both sides of their balance sheet. It takes an in-depth look at securities investment strategies, balance sheet and asset/liability strategies, regulatory topics and general economic information. To view this issue, click the image below. In This Issue: At Least We Aren’t Europe Bond of The Day – When Does 2% ≠ 2%? More Problems… Read More

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9 Mar 2015

It’s Good News that Good News is Bad News

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) offered some good news regarding the employment situation on Friday. The economy added 295,000 new jobs in February, far better than the consensus expectations of 240,000 and the unemployment rate fell from 5.7 to 5.5 percent, a new low since the 2008 financial crisis and the peak unemployment rate since then of 10 percent in 2009. Part of the reason for the decline in… Read More

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20 Feb 2015

The Euro: Making Calls and Taking Falls

For a second day in a row stocks were mixed but lacked any major movement, as traders took a bit of a breather after Wednesday’s release of the Federal Reserve’s meeting minutes. Oil sold off for the second day in a row but that market seems to have calmed down from the major volatility of the last few months to settle right around the $50 per barrel area. The major… Read More

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23 Jan 2015

The ECB Strikes Back

After years of stalling, the European Central Bank (ECB) finally launched a meaningful quantitative easing (QE), or bond-buying program. ECB President Mario Draghi announced that the ECU will buy €60 billion, which at today’s rate is roughly equivalent to $69 billion dollars. The program will begin in March and is expected to last through at least September 2016, which means that the ECB is expected to spend close to €1… Read More

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22 Jan 2015

Burgernomics

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) revaluation of the Swiss franc caused me to look at The Economist magazine’s ‘Burgernomics’ website (which can be found here). While it may not be popular with high minded economists, the Burgernomics site attempts to put a fundamental value on currencies from around the world by looking at the cost of buying a Big Mac in each country. In theory, a Big Mac ought to… Read More

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12 Jan 2015

Finally, A Regulation You Can Opt-Out Of

In the December 2012 issue of ALM Insights, I wrote an article titled Basel III’s AFS Provision. At the time of the article, the provision detailing the effects of Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income (AOCI) on regulatory capital had been delayed due to a “wide range of views”, and the final outcome was still very much up in the air. Few in the banking industry thought that forcing banks of all… Read More

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