financial flows – ffwiley.com

2 Charts That Might Define the Fed’s Jerome Powell Era

In September, we proposed a theory of the Fed and suggested the FOMC will soon worry mostly about financial imbalances without much concern for recession risks. We reached that conclusion by weighing the reputational pitfalls faced by the economists on the committee, but now we’ll add more meat to our argument, using financial flows data released last week.

We’ve created two charts, beginning with a look at cumulative, inflation-adjusted asset gains during the last seven business cycles:

QE’s Untold Story: A Chart That Fed Correspondents Need To Investigate

October 31, 2017ffwBank of England, Bill Dudley, credit demand, excess reserves, Federal Reserve, financial flows, FOMC, Kevin Warsh, money multiplier theory, net lending, QE, Richard Fisher, wealth effects19 Comments

We’ve produced some research over the years that we’d love to see the powers-that-be react to, but none more so than our look at financial flows during the QE programs.

By netting all lending by banks and broker-dealers and then comparing it to the Fed’s lending, we stumbled upon a chart that seemed to show exactly what QE does or doesn’t do. But “doesn’t” was the story, and it couldn’t have been clearer or shown a more stimulating pattern. Our Excel click on “Insert, Line” was like stepping from a shady trail to a sunny vista.

Here’s the updated chart, which we dubbed the “argyle effect” and looks even sharper than it did when we first produced it in 2014: