The premise
Most money is not printed. It is created by banks when they lend — and destroyed when loans are repaid. The central bank sets the price of that credit; it does not set the quantity.
Every lens on this site follows from that one sentence:
- The Corridor is the price of the credit banks create.
- Plumbing is the quantity of it at the margin — reserves, TGA, RRP.
- Scarcity is the asset that cannot be created — the hedge against the created thing.
- Credit & Stress is what happens when creation runs in reverse.
- Governance & Power is who controls the creation, and on what terms.
Most errors in financial commentary trace back to the pile-of-coins model — the idea that money is a fixed stock handed out by a central bank. The rotation is the correction.
What this is
A daily read on the money system, in five lenses, published on a weekday rotation.
Alongside the rotation runs the wire: US data as it prints — CPI, payrolls, PCE. A report is not a lens on the money system, it is a reading taken off it, so it runs on the release calendar rather than the weekday one. Same discipline, different clock.
The rotation
- Monday — The Corridor. The price of money. Fed path, SOFR curve, auctions, real rates.
- Tuesday — Plumbing. The quantity of money. Reserves, TGA, RRP, SOFR–IORB, funding at the margin.
- Wednesday — Scarcity. The hard-asset trade. BTC, gold, copper/gold, energy, BTC-treasury complex.
- Thursday — Credit & Stress. Where the crack shows first. HY/IG OAS, MOVE, bank funding.
- Friday — Governance & Power. Fiscal dominance, supply, central-bank independence, reserve status.
Reports (off the rotation)
US data drops — CPI, payrolls, PCE — published the day they print, not on a theme day. A report states what came in against what was expected, then what it means for the trade, with an explicit bullish / neutral / bearish tag per asset. It is the only place on the site where the release itself is the subject.
Three lenses, applied every day
Money, scarcity and governance are not themes — they are measurement lenses applied to whatever the day's subject is. An auction is a scarcity event. A credit spread is a governance tell.
The composite
Every series is z-scored against a rolling three-year history and oriented so that positive means stress. The z-scores roll into five sub-indices — Rates & Policy, Liquidity, Credit & Stress, Growth & Inflation, Scarcity — which average into one headline score and a regime label.
Weights are equal within each sub-index. This is a transparency choice, not a claim of optimality. A composite that cannot be explained in a paragraph cannot be trusted when it disagrees with you.
Regime bands
- Below −1.0 — Risk-on / liquid
- −1.0 to −0.35 — Easing
- −0.35 to +0.35 — Neutral
- +0.35 to +1.0 — Tightening
- Above +1.0 — Stress / defensive
Accountability
Every post closes with one call and the level that invalidates it. The blog is the track record.
Sources
US Treasury daily yield curve (home.treasury.gov), NY Fed reference rates, Treasury Fiscal Data (TGA), FRED (reserves, RRP, OAS, claims, CPI, breakevens) and Yahoo Finance (market prices). Data is fetched once daily and stored as a snapshot.