“There is no sense that inflation is coming down,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a November 2 press conference, — this despite eight months of aggressive interest rate hikes and “quantitative tightening.” On November 30, the stock market rallied when he said smaller interest rate increases are likely ahead and could start in […]
Submitted by Steve Brown…
“Dear Member of Congress,
By commissioning Wall Street behemoth BlackRock to manage its corporate debt purchase program the Federal Reserve has outsourced bail-outs to a key component of Wall Street’s corruption, where there is no potential for BlackRock to do the right thing.
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns:
Russia is going to be a destination for safe-haven flows in the post-COVID-19 world. It will be due to its vast savings, prudent fiscal policy and maneuver room available in monetary policy.
What’s going on in the repo market? Rates on repurchase agreements (“repo”) should be around 2%, in line with the fed funds rate. But they shot up to over 5% on September 16 and got as high as 10% on September 17. Yet banks were refusing to lend to each other, evidently passing up big […]
The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss European Central Bank President Mario Draghi decision to cut deposit rates and start open-ended bond purchases. Draghi is making a final run at reflating the euro-area economy, before Christine Lagarde takes over as ECB chief.
Draghi and Lagarde are moving to further integrate the EU along the lines of French President Emmanuel Macron’s vision of an all-powerful, centralized Brussels ruling over weakened, periphery member states.
As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the US and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage. […]
According to Zerohedge, just when you thought Turkey’s moment of agony couldn’t get any worse, it got much worse, when watching the collapse of the Turkish Lira and sensing perhaps that Erdogan’s end is near, President Donald Trump blindsided the NATO member state with a tweet, announcing that he is doubling Turkey’s steel and aluminum tariffs to 50% and 20%, respectively. Why?
(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — For those who believe in the virtue of central bank economic stimulus, the moment of truth has finally arrived. Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen announced late last month that the Fed plans to start shrinking its balance sheet for the first time since it expanded from less than $900 billion in 2008 to an unprecedented $4.5 trillion today.
(ZHE) While in recent weeks there has been a material increase in Fed balance sheet normalization chatter, according to a new report from Deutsche Bank analysts, it may all be for nothing for one simple reason: should the US encounter a recession in the next several years, the most likely reaction by the Fed would be another $1 trillion in QE (see: bailout), delaying indefinitel
