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"Fed Chair Janet Yellen says that in looking at asset prices and valuations, the central bank is 'not trying to opine on whether they're correct'; instead, policy makers are assessing the risk of potential spillovers. As asset prices rise, there hasn't been a substantial increase in borrowing, Yellen said. [The] financial system is strong and resilient." I assume chair Yellen is referring to U.S. non-financial and non-government borrowings. Clearly, central bank Credit and government borrowings have expanded spectacularly around the globe. I suspect as well there has been a major expansion in speculative leveraging and securities Credit at home and...

National Economic Council director and President Donald Trump's top economic advisor, Gary Cohn, is the leading candidate to take over the top job at the Federal Reserve, according to a report from Politico. Politico's Ben White and Victoria Guida said Tuesday that if Cohn wants the job currently occupied by Chair Janet Yellen, it's his to take, according to four sources close to the replacement search. Cohn had been reportedly leading up the search for someone to take over for Yellen when her term expires in February 2018. Reports also suggested that Cohn may be interested in the job.

When Kathy Griffin posed for a photoshoot holding a fake decapitated, bloody head of President Donald Trump in June, she likely didn’t think about the wide-reaching implications of her so-called “joke.” While her controversial stunt resulted in some serious professional consequences, it also earned her a lengthy visit from the U.S. Secret Service. Secret Service agents reportedly tracked down Griffin and interviewed her in person for more than an hour. Further, the investigation into the bloody head debacle remains open. Griffin’s attorney, Dmitry Gorin, has claimed the comedian was merely exercising her “First Amendment rights to tell a joke.” “When...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen was treated at King Edward VII hospital in London over the weekend for a urinary tract infection. She was admitted Friday and released Monday. She is returning to Washington, D.C., and expects to resume her schedule as planned this week. Chair Yellen was in London for an event Tuesday, June 27, at the British Academy and stayed in London for a brief vacation with her family. For media inquiries, call 202-452-2955

Richmond Fed President Lacker says he was involved with Medley leak, announces immediate resignation Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker announced his immediate resignation Tuesday, admitting that he discussed sensitive information with an analyst regarding the Fed's plans for economic stimulus.

While many of the targeted federal agencies have offices outside Washington, Trump's dream budget would hit the region disproportionately, with tens of thousands of jobs at risk. The cuts would be felt throughout the city, with fewer people riding the already-beleaguered Metro subway or eating at restaurants. It would also hurt Washington's already-shaky market for office space. Economist Stephen Fuller of George Mason University, who has studied the regional economy for decades, estimated 20,000-24,000 federal employees and 10,000 federal contractors would lose their jobs under Trump's proposal. That equates to 5 percent of federal workers in the region. With those...

Now that the dust has settled on the elections, the time has come (or so some of the punditry in the media assure us) to set aside political acrimony and unite under the new leadership of President-elect Donald Trump and the new House and Senate. Although it’s far from clear what President Trump will choose to prioritize, now that he will face the realities of entrenched political interests in Washington instead of his fired-up political base on the hustings, it seems at least possible that he will show much more sympathy for certain constitutionalist and Americanist causes — such as...

In a move that Democrats in the committee fought very hard to resist, a house panel has approved a legislation that will allow a government watchdog audit the federal reserve's spending. Democrats in the committee were firmly against the bill.

In the past 10 years there have been only three Fed Funds rate increases. Two of those increases have occurred since President Trump won the election on November 8th, 2016. No Fed Funds Rate increases took place between June 2006 and December 2015. CNBC reported in December 2015 that President Obama oversaw “seven years of the most accommodative monetary policy in U.S. history” (from the Fed). Finally, in December 2015 after the Fed announced its first increase in the Fed Funds rate during the Obama Presidency, it was reported that: Given the economic outlook, and recognizing the time it takes...

Some fear rate hikes could tip the economy into a recession. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday lifted benchmark interest rates for only the third time in about a decade, and that has caused trepidation among some market participants. Lance Roberts, chief investment strategist at Clarity Financial, makes the case in one chart that raising interest rates off ultralow levels during a period of tepid economic growth coincides with recessions in the following three to nine months (see chart below, which compares real, inflation-adjusted, GDP to Fed interest rate levels). The Fed lifted key rates by a quarter-point Wednesday to a...

Most Americans do not understand this, but the truth is that the Federal Reserve has far more power over the U.S. economy than anyone else does, and that includes Donald Trump. Politicians tend to get the credit or the blame for how the economy is performing, but in reality it is an unelected, unaccountable panel of central bankers that is running the show, and until something is done about the Fed our long-term economic problems will never be fixed. For an extended analysis of this point, please see this article. In this piece, I am going to explain why the...

"While it may not be the very definition of irony, we do find the fact that the Atlanta Fed has just cut its Q1 GDP forecast from 1.2% to 0.9%, a number which if confirmed would be the lowest quarterly print in year, just two hours before the Fed's rate hike quite humorous. As a reminder, the number was as high as 3.4% one and a half months ago."

For the first time this year, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, a widely expected move following strengthening economic reports and signals from Fed officials. After its two-day policy meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to raise the range of the federal funds rate to 0.75% and 1.00%, citing progress in labor market growth, business fixed investment and inflation. “In view of realized and expected labor market conditions and inflation, the Committee decided to raise…the fed funds rate,” the central bank wrote in its statement. One member of the committee, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, voted against the decision,...

U.S. stocks traded higher Wednesday, helped by a bounce in oil prices, after the Fed raised interest rates, as expected. Shorter-end Treasury yields came off session highs. The 2-year yield (U.S.:US2Y) fell to 1.33 percent after earlier hitting a high of 1.401 percent, its highest since June 11, 2009. The 10-year yield (U.S.:US10Y) traded around 2.58 percent as of 2:01 p.m.

Raphael Bostic, a former Obama administration housing official, was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, becoming the first African-American selected to lead one of the 12 regional Fed banks in the institution’s century of existence. Mr. Bostic, a 50-year-old professor of public policy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, will take over June 5, the Atlanta Fed said Monday. He succeeds Dennis Lockhart, who retired at the end of February after a decade of service, and his appointment was approved by the Atlanta Fed’s board of directors and the Fed board of governors, the...

Eight years after the crisis of 2008-09, central banks are still injecting $200 billion a month into the global financial system to keep it from imploding. If you want a central banker to choke on his croissant, read him this quote from socio-historian Immanuel Wallerstein: "Countries (have lost the ability) to control what happens to them in the ongoing life of the modern world-system." Stated another way, Wallerstein is asking: what do central banks no longer control? The quote is from Wallerstein's recent meditation on China: China is Confident: How Realistic? "The question is how realistic is this self-assessment of...

Yesterday I told you that the US government had recently released its annual financial report to the public.And the numbers are pretty gruesome.For example, the government’s “net loss� in fiscal year 2016 more than doubled, from MINUS $467 billion to MINUS $1 trillion.It’s astonishing that anyone could manage to lose so much money, let alone in a year where devoid of major wars, recessions, financial crises, or infrastructure projects.But what else can we expect from an institution that spent billions of dollars to build a website?Today I wanted to highlight a few other items from the government’s report that are...

You might remember the story of Obama’s DHS hacking the State of Georgia around the time of the 2016 Election. I was highly interested in the story, but the only explanation that was revealed by Jeh Johnson was a strange one of a “copy and paste” mistake by a lowly DHS worker. It did not make sense, so I did not report on it. However, it has just been revealed to be more of a story now; in fact, it could be a pretty big one for Obama and Jeh Johnson. Title 18 of the federal code makes it a...

Though they are officially “non-profit” organizations, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, and several other Christian organizations are profiting from lucrative contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees in the United States. Of the 100,000 refugees resettled in the United States in 2014 under the Refugee Resettlement program, an estimated 40 percent were Muslims. In FY 2015, the State Department, through the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, spent more than $1 billion on these programs, which settled international refugees “vetted” by the United Nations High Commission on International Refugees in all 50 states...

"If Hillary Clinton would have won the election, then the Fed would have continued with more moderate interest rate hikes – or none at all – as they did for President Obama. So let’s get this straight – when the Fed raises interest rates it is to worsen the U.S. economy. Why? When interest rates go up, what happens? There is less borrowing. So what do you suppose happens to the total amount of money in the U.S. economy when there is less borrowing? There is less money. And that’s how the Fed justifies it.