bond markets

This week was a huge one for the soft landing camp. The inflation data came in cool and the Federal Reserve indicated its confidence that it can begin monetary tightening fairly soon. Meanwhile, baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani signed a staggering $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers that comes with a highly unusual deal structure. To break it down, we talked with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Conor Sen about what it all means.

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There are a bunch of historical analogies that people like to reach for in order to describe some of the economic trends we're seeing today. There's obviously the period of high inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s, or the disruptions caused by the Spanish Flu pandemic around 1918. But there's also a single year -- 1953 -- which not only contains some eerie similarities to today's economic environment, but also ended up having far-reaching consequences that reverberate all the way to 2022. On this episode, Josh Younger, JPMorgan's global head of asset and liability management research and strategy, tells the origin story of the decisions made in 1953 that helped create the vast repurchase or repo market. At a time when there are plenty of concerns over the stability of the market for US bonds, we go back in time to explore the reasons why repo exist at all.

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The year is over, and now's the time to look back at the big stories of the past year. On this week's episode, we're joined by Chris Nagi and Matt Boesler of Bloomberg News to discuss what they saw as the dominant themes of 2017. For Nagi, it was the relentless decline in market volatility (despite a year of remarkable headlines) and for Boesler it was the persistent shortfall in inflation, and the challenge that that's posing to traditional economic models.

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