Thursday, April 9, 2015

Am I supposed to analyze ECB's version of QE?

From a link via Brad Delong:
The tail risks that may be generated by Mario Draghi's monetary policy innovations in the Eurozone include even more intense versions of Andrew Haldane's "Doom Loops"

 I presume Brad thinks I will jump on this QE thing and look at it from the point of vies of Hyperbolic flows.  And I suppose I am to identify the mopvement from the short end, a cold position, making the sub-optimum Wythoff move, passing a chunk of liquidity over that blue hump where the ECB picks the thing and makes a slightly cold move.  The thing that passes it what called a Negative Yield to Maturity bond, something that does not meet the Compton adiabatic condition to maintain life.

I would think of it as a two sided Wythoff game where no player wants to win.  For the trader, Tanh(0), quant zero, is a win, but you get trapped with negative rates and no loan capacity. Their game is to borrow there way to quant one, where they by one of these NYTM bonds, then keep push their way up to the top of that blue line, quant 1.5, where they sell their junk bond to the ECB, then cruise back, passing through quant one, then turining before being trapped in a winning position. Thus, repeating the process.  For the ECB, quant two is where they get their lending authority. If they hit quant three, they win, and Germany gets the goodies. They want to avoid that.  But both sides oscillate up and down in a choreography..  The market place, at the top of that blue line, is where the market is maximally divergent, and equally balanced. Symmetric tail risks, no arbitrage. The process between the two sides is a Hamiltonian, and the exchange is really another form of the Feynman diagram.

Money is never created or destroyed in this game, there is no seigniorage changes, all money is tied in movements by the force of interest.  Hence, it is a dangerous game for the slow players, easy to get stuck in a winning position. Once in the wining position, money is given up, the player pays a fee to return to the game.

it all sounds like a fun game, Germany hedges the right, the hedge funds hedge the left. Anyway, it goes something like that, market experts, like Rajiv Sethi, can fill in the details. My recommendation to Italy and Spain is do not play, this is not a sport governments can win.

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