Racing to Keep Up: A New Era for Car Buyers and Dealers
Remember the cheesy commercials offering new cars ‘with no money down’ or monthly lease prices on new cars ‘so low, we’re practically giving them away’? Well despite seeming like a…
What Higher Interest Rates Mean for New Home Buyers?
Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash After months of record lows, interest rates are on the rise. That’s great news for people with interest bearing savings account, but not such good news for…
It’s Official: Inflation is Here. Should You Be Worried?
The news from the Federal Reserve confirmed what many had been suggesting in recent weeks: the U.S. economy is rapidly heating up. Concerns about the potential for inflation have been…
Where Does Profit Come from in the Payments Industry?
The recent development in the payments industry, namely the rise of Fintech companies, has created an opportunity to revisit the economics of the payment system and the puzzling nature of…
Is the Recent Buyback Spree Creating Liquidity Problems for the Dealers?
The anxiaties about large financial corporations' debt-funded payouts—aka "stock buybacks"—is reemerging a decade after the financial crisis. Companies on the S&P 500 have poured more than $5.3 trillion into repurchasing…
Is the Fed Losing Steam in Controlling Interest Rate?
As the final countdown to bring in 2020 begins, new concerns have emerged regarding the Fed's continuous ability to control the interest rate. Developments in the financial market such as…
Should the Fed Open its Balance Sheet to the Securities Dealers? A Lesson from the Recent Wild Swings in the Repo Rate
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new” -Socrates If the Fed's understanding of the existing problems in…
What Rules Inflation Targeting? A Time for Abandoning Taylor Rule
“No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.” ? Haruki Murakami Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), most central banks around…