Free Republic

The Federal Reserve created a monster $4.3 trillion balance sheet, up by $3 trillion from 2008, through quantitative easing. QE ends this fall. Now the Fed is trying to figure out what to do with this monster. Their thinking seems to be that they can maintain control over it by paying banks more money to not make loans. So let's get this right. Households and businesses are attempting to borrow money from banks. But the Federal Reserve may eventually pay banks $100 billion per year not to lend to Main Street. Politicians will have a field day with that. The...

The Federal Reserve System in the United States was created by Congress in 1913 and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Since its creation, the purchasing power of the US Dollar has declined 96%. purchasingpowerfed But according to a House of Commons Library Report entitled “Inflation: the value of the pound, 1750-2011,” RESEARCH PAPER 12/31 29 May, 2012, RP12-31 (1), the decline in purchasing power of the British Pound since 1913 equals 99%! poundpurchaepowe Note that the shape of the decline of purchasing power following the creation of the Federal Reserve System in the US are virtually identical. With...

Nearly half of all illegal immigrant children don’t show up for their deportation hearings, federal officials testified to Congress on Wednesday, underscoring just how easy it is for those surging across the border right now to disappear into the shadows. The number could be even higher for the current surge of unaccompanied children flooding across the border, who are often released to illegal immigrant parents who have no incentive to bring their children to immigration courts. And federal authorities specifically refuse to ask the legal status of the parents or relatives who come to claim the children, officials acknowledged. “We...

How does the U.S. economy do it? Europe is floundering. China faces slower growth. Japan is struggling to sustain tentative gains. Yet the U.S. job market is humming, and the pace of economic growth is steadily rising. Five full years after a devastating recession officially ended, the economy is finally showing the vigor that Americans have long awaited. Last month, employers added 288,000 jobs and helped reduce the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, the lowest since September 2008. June capped a five-month stretch of 200,000-plus job gains - the first in nearly 15 years. After having shrunk at a 2.9...

The banking industry likes superfluous language. There's "quantitative finance" for example, which (given that finance isalready a quantitative subject) is a bit like saying "aerial flight" or "wet swimming". And then there's "forward guidance". What, as opposed to backward guidance? I mean, what other type of guidance is there? Last summer the Bank of England (BoE) decided it wanted to import the U.S. Federal Reserve's forward guidance policy. In short this went along the lines of "we'll link future moves in the base rate to other external market indicators, so that as these other indicators move then so will base...

U.S. stocks climbed on Wednesday, lifting the S&P 500 to a record finish, after the Federal Reserve said the economy is rebounding and that interest rates would stay low for some time. "We are inching from unprecedented accommodation to policy tightening, even though it's not imminent," said Anastasia Amoroso, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds. The Fed alluded to a slightly faster pace of interest rate increases next year, while suggesting benchmark borrowing costs in the longer term would be lower than the Fed has indicated before. Fed Chair Janet Yellen attempted to "introduce a degree of uncertainty into...

Joe WeisenthalMay 26, 2014, 11:11 AM At the end of last year, we wrote a post titled: Pretty Soon We Need To Talk About Inflation. The argument was not that inflation was going to be a problem, or that the Fed needed to tighten rates, or anything like that. It simply pointed out that since the crisis, there's been no legitimate reason to even be discussing inflation, since there wasn't any. But that that was about to change. And indeed, here in 2014, there are indeed a lot of people talking about inflation. Morgan Stanley's Vincent Reinhart writes in a...

Chriss W. Street 26 May 2014 After five years of the federal government telling the public that despite a $3.5 trillion increase in monetary expansion, the inflation rate is below +2%, the Department of Agriculture (DOA) just warned the American public that the consumer price index for food is up by 10% this year. The DOA tried to blame food inflation on the drought conditions in California, but last year’s drought was worse and food prices fell by -6%. The real problem is Federal Reserve monetary stimulus is stimulating inflation. I reported in "Food Price Inflation Scares the Fed” two...

The way Charles Plosser sees it, the Federal Reserve is sitting on a ticking time bomb that could severely damage the economy unless the central bank reacts quickly to defuse the looming threat. The Philadelphia Fed president, viewed as one of the bank’s leading hawks, is worried about some $2.5 trillion in “excess” reserves. That is, loanable funds available to individual or corporate borrowers through the nation’s banks. The Fed has created these reserves through unpredented purchases of U.S. Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities, a strategy known as quantatative easing. These reserves are just sitting in the bank system, basically doing...

Mises Institute: How would you translate your new book’s title into English? Andreas Marquant: I would like to say The State Causes the Poverty It Later Claims to Solve. This is the title of my article on mises.org last December. An even better title could be The Austrian Answer to Thomas Piketty. MI: Your book addresses the issue of income inequality. Is income inequality a bad thing? AM: First of all, inequality and income inequality are natural phenomena because people are different. They all have different talents and that is a reason for the division of labor. It’s also a...

An ABC News investigation found that a badly-flawed and archaic government recall system has permitted millions of potentially dangerous tires to remain in use, on store shelves for sale or simply unaccounted for.

TARP was the absolute height of crony capitalism. Many of the big banks should have gone down, but in the midst of a “Blackberry panic” – as David Stockman puts it – the masters of the masters of the universe lost sight of reality and the nature of markets. Yes, Goldman Sachs would have gone down. But this would have been a GOOD THING. The blood which should have filled the the streets of Downtown Manhattan would have washed the unsustainable leverage clean from the system (for a while.) Giants are meant to fall. It would have been good for...

“Got a buck? you’re in luck!” This jingle was a staple for you ever since your parents started giving you an allowance. At the time, you got maybe $5 a week to spend or save as you pleased. Although this was a fortune as far as you were concerned, a fiver tends to evaporate quickly, and your snack options were limited. One of the few exceptions to this was McDonalds. For just a dollar and change you could get a double cheeseburger or even hot fudge sundaes. Fast forward 5 years. You’re paying a lot for college, so the Dollar...

A school district in Chicago’s northwest suburbs is quitting the National School Lunch Program over new regulations championed by first lady Michelle Obama. The so-called Smart Snacks in School policy, set to take effect on July 1, is the latest attempt by our Regulator-in-Chief to dictate every aspect of Americans’ behavior. It dictates strict calorie, sodium, fat, and sugar guidelines for any food sold in schools during the day. That even includes the ubiquitous bake sales and other fundraisers. Instead of forcing the school district’s 500 low income kids and others to eat “healthier,” however, the administration is only creating...

In testimony before a Senate committee on Thursday, Fed Chair Yellen said a minimum wage increase would likely have some negative effects on jobs, though it´s not clear how large. Still, boosting the federal minimum wage, which has remained at $7.25 per hour since mid-2009, would benefit some people, she added. In recent months, the federal minimum wage has been a hot-button issue. In February, President Barack Obama boosted the minimum pay for federal contractors hired in the future to $10.10 per hour. He´s also voiced his support for the federal level for all workers to rise to $10.10 from

Gold is falling after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen gave an upbeat assessment of the U.S. economy and said that inflation remains low. […] Yellen’s comments suggest that the Federal Reserve is set to continue reducing its economic stimulus, lessening the threat of rising prices. Investors typically buy gold as a hedge against inflation. …

When it comes to the San Francisco Fed, it is best known throughout the financial community as the group of crack economists who spend millions of taxpayer funds to investigate such probing, for kindergarteners at least, topics as: is water wet, do trees make a sound when they fall in the forest, is it still worth going to college, and are hedge funds important in a crisis. Little did we know that, at least some of them, are homicidal psychopaths with suicidal tendencies. Because this is precisely what was revealed moments ago when Bloomberg reported that the chief operating officer...

The Fed Could Have Bought California & Texas… or All of China & Japan's Treasuries With QE Money Phoenix Capital Research 05/06/2014 12:31 The Federal Reserve has spent over $3.2 trillion in the post-Crisis era. The bulk of this money printing has gone towards buying garbage mortgage securities or US Treasuries from Wall Street. Because we’ve reached a point in time at which $1 trillion no longer sounds like a lot of money, we thought we’d go through the exercise of assessing just what the Fed could have done with this money besides give it to Wall Street. With $3.2...

Foreign individuals and businesses long ago cut back on their purchases of U.S. bonds. Their place was taken by foreign central banks. The central banks simply created money in their own currency and used it to buy our bonds.The Federal Reserve always knew that we couldn’t rely on foreign central banks to buy our bonds forever. This may be the main reason it began the program called quantitative easing, in which the Fed created money out of thin air specifically to buy back U.S. debt.Quantitative easing may have been intended to be a kind of insurance policy. If foreign central...

Armed federal agents deployed last week to northeast Clark County, Nev., for what can only be described as a major escalation in a decades-long standoff between a local cattle rancher and the U.S. government. .Cliven Bundy, the last remaining rancher in the southern Nevada county, stands in defiance of a 2013 court order demanding that he remove his cattle from public land managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. The 67-year-old veteran rancher, who has compared the situation to similar confrontations with government officials in Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas, told TheBlaze that his family...

Last week, St. Louis Fed Director of Research David Andolfatto released a presentation on Bitcoin, becoming one of the most prominent central bank officials to study the cryptocurrency. We caught up with Andolfatto to ask him about why he put this deck together, where he thinks Bitcoin is going, and whether he personally has anything invested in it. Business Insider: What was the genesis for this presentation? David Andolfatto: Its genesis was a blog post I'd started, addressing arguments that gold bugs frequently put forth, that gold is superior money. Of course, Bitcoin was in the news — I read...

The fear of deflation serves as the theoretical justification of every inflationary action taken by the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world. It is why the Federal Reserve targets a price inflation rate of 2 percent, and not 0 percent. It is in large part why the Federal Reserve has more than quadrupled the money supply since August 2008. And it is, remarkably, a great myth, for there is nothing inherently dangerous or damaging about deflation. Deflation is feared not only by the followers of Milton Friedman (those from the so-called Monetarist or Chicago School of economics), but...

Janet Yellen REUTERS The monetary policies crafted and initiated by the Federal Reserve are intended to help Main Street rather than Wall Street, Fed Chair Janet Yellen told an audience of grassroots community organizers in Chicago on Monday. In an address that employed a handful of devices reminiscent of a political speech, Yellen made her case for a dovish approach toward raising interest rates. Yellen singled out the plights of several individuals – who she named and whose situations she described in detail – to illustrate labor markets are healing slowly and prolonged accommodative policy is needed to ensure labor...

It's not the managers who are incompetent, it's the organization itself that is incompetent. I received a number of interesting reader responses to my previous entries on the incompetence of the Federal Reserve and the Deep State: The Federal Reserve: Masters of the Universe or Trapped Incompetents? (March 21, 2014) Why Is Our Government (and Deep State) So Incompetent? (March 6, 2014) Some readers thought I was underestimating the power of these institutions to pursue essentially unlimited money-printing and related global strategies. While I understand the apparent power of unlimited money-printing and global Empire, my point (poorly articulated the first...

Make a guess and place you bets – we all know it’s on it way, the next crash is going to happen sooner or later, it's just a question of what the left will try to do to not waste another “serious crisis” Think about it – the Fed is Printing money.. .excuse me “Digitizing” – they can’t even go through the motion of spitting out worthless paper that diminishes our savings, they have to add insult to injury with that sort o chicanery Let’s face it, somewhere in the deep dark crevices of the leftist mind, they have their...

I would like to win the lottery; many others would like to win the billion dollar prize for the one with the perfect brackets for March Madness, some would simply like the year off with pay and a whole bunch of Americans would like a job. Where are the fairy God Mothers when we need them? A large number of our friends and relatives would like to rid themselves of diseases that are holding them back; a large group would like peace in our time; the President would like a computer and internet Guru, too many young girls would like...

The spring of 2014 has not yet begun, but a jittery Wall Street was spooked Wednesday by the prospect that interest rates might rise “as soon as” the spring of 2015. That was the immediate response to Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen’s first press conference since taking office. Yellen’s mere suggestion that the Fed might someday pursue a less inflationary policy has been blamed for a drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and armchair central bankers are jumping on the rookie Fed chief for talking the market down. Fed may raise rates as soon as next spring, Yellen suggests:...

Investors weren't too thrilled by what they heard from Janet Yellen during her first meeting in charge of the Fed. The Dow fell more than 100 points, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq also finished lower. Stocks were relatively stable as Yellen started her press conference. But the Dow fell as many as 180 points before recovering after she said the Fed's stimulus program would most likely be finished by the fall and that a rate hike could come as soon as early 2015. Prior to the press conference, the Fed said it will continue trimming, or tapering, its monthly...

A month ago we reported that according to much delayed TIC data, China had just dumped the second-largest amount of US Treasurys in history. The problem, of course, with this data is that it is stale and very backward looking. For a much better, and up to date, indicator of what foreigners are doing with US Treasurys in near real time, the bond watchers keep track of a less known data series, called "Treasury Securities Held in Custody for Foreign Official and International Accounts" which as the name implies shows what foreigners are doing with their Treasury securities held...

Stock markets around the world fell today, led by the 246 point dive, or 1.5%, for the U.S. Dow Jones Industrial Average and the 1.9% drop for German stock market index.  Analysts generally pointed to worries about a shrinking Chinese lending and the potential trade war between Russia and the West, but I am more concerned that since the beginning of 2014 food prices have skyrocketed.  The Federal Reserve must be concerned that their international support for “cheap money policies� to stimulate economic growth may be funding commodity speculation that is driving prices higher and creating wide spread misery. If...

America’s consciousness has shifted.  We live in a predominantly unstable and unpredictable world, a situation long accepted as the norm, however,  we also live during the first period of history in which America's prominence in the world and its own vision and notion of itself, has been blurred.  A majority of Americans have adopted self doubt and the confidence America has held through much of its story has been dissipated. Through the fog of apprehension Americans plucked an unknown to take the helm of their governance.  The fog did not lift, and in fact with the unknown’s propagation of envy, the...

Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, and other officials from the BOE were put through a five hour marathon of questioning yesterday by Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee covering everything from how long the BOE plans to continue Quantitative Easing (QE), to the potential for Scotland to vote for its independence, to what it knew and when it knew it about the rigging of the Foreign Exchange market by colluding global banks. The bombshell of the day, however, did not occur during the session on the Foreign Exchange scandal, which is stacking up to be a more serious...

The Federal Reserve’s seemingly endless program of quantitative easing (QE) begun under Ben Bernanke, and continuing at a slightly slower pace under Janet Yellen, has some of the punditry and much of the electorate up in arms. With good reason. Implicit in quantitative easing is the horribly obtuse notion that central banks can produce real economic growth through their monetary machinations. If only life were so simple. Back in the world of the reasonable, the sole purpose of money is as a stable measure of value that facilitates the exchange of goods and investment. Quantitative easing, by its very name,...

Article based on excerpts from Baupost Group's Seth Klarman letter. "there is a growing gap between the financial markets and the real economy...and the overall picture is one of growing risk and inadequate potential return almost everywhere one looks..."

Like John Stossel and Thomas Sowell, I’m not a big fan of the Federal Reserve. It’s not just that I’m a libertarian who fantasizes about the denationalization of money. I also think the Fed hasn’t done a good job, even by its own metrics. There’s very little doubt, for instance, that easy-money policies last decade played a major role in creating the housing bubble and causing the financial crisis. Yes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played a big role, but it was the Fed that provided the excess liquidity that the GSEs used to subsidize the subprime lending orgy. But...

Unusually harsh winter weather appears to be behind recent signs of weakness in the U.S. economy, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said on Thursday, suggesting the central bank was poised to press forward in ratcheting back its stimulus. Testifying to the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen said the Fed would watch carefully to ensure weather was indeed the culprit, but she reiterated that it would take a "significant change" to the economy's prospects for the Fed to put plans to wind down its bond-buying program on hold.

When US money supply measured by M2 stood at $11 trillion in December 2013, I calculate that total broad money of the next largest 50 countries ranked by GDP amounted to the equivalent of a further US$67 trillion at current exchange rates. And that’s only on-balance sheet: we must add in global shadow banking, estimated by the Financial Stability Board to have been an extra $67 trillion in 2011, probably about $75 trillion today, given its recent rapid growth in China. So when we look at US broad money supply, we should be aware there is a further mountain of...

There wasn't a lot of volume, but the market shrugged off an early indecision and rallied higher. The bias is to the upside, and despite a shaky start to the year, the long-term trend remains intact, which is very encouraging. Also encouraging is that the market is moving higher, even as the dollar edged higher as conventional wisdom shifts towards the belief; that it's going to take a universally acknowledged disaster or hiccup in the economy, for the Fed to divert from its unofficial goal of monthly tapering. The market moving higher on less Fed accommodation has been the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. central bankers thought they should get more regulatory powers in return for providing cheap cash to Wall Street banks during the 2008 credit crisis, according to Federal Reserve transcripts released on Friday. Powerful investment banks such as Goldman Sachs (NYS:GS - News) and Morgan Stanley (NYS:MS - News) had access to a raft of measures to prop up markets during the 2008 credit meltdown, but the Federal Reserve had little say over them. "I am just a little worried about being taken advantage of here," Richard Fisher, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said...

On Tuesday, new Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen went before Congress and confidently declared that "the economic recovery gained greater traction in the second half of last year" and that "substantial progress has been made in restoring the economy to health". This resulted in glowing headlines throughout the mainstream media such as this one from USA Today: "Yellen: Economy is improving at moderate pace". Sadly, tens of millions of Americans are going to believe what the mainstream media is telling them. But it isn't the truth. As you will see below, there are all sorts of signs that the economy...

In her first testimony before Congress as Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen pledged to continue on the path set by her predecessor Ben Bernanke. “His leadership helped make our economy and financial system stronger and ensured that the Federal Reserve is transparent and accountable,” said Yellen in a remarks delivered before the House Committee of Financial Services Tuesday morning.Speaking about the economic recovery, monetary policy and the financial systems Yellen expressed optimism about developments in recent months, but also made it clear work must be done to meet the Federal Open Market Committee’s objectives for the economy.In a note following...

The Federal Reserve (or Fed) has assumed sweeping new powers in the last year. In an unprecedented move in March 2008, the New York Fed advanced the funds for JPMorgan Chase Bank to buy investment bank Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar. The deal was particularly controversial because Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, sits on the board of the New York Fed and participated in the secret weekend negotiations.1 In September 2008, the Federal Reserve did something even more unprecedented, when it bought the world’s largest insurance company. The Fed announced on September 16 that it was giving an...

<p>U.S. equity markets zipped higher Friday after a round of weak jobs data inspired hopes the Fed may take more time to boost rates and cut its bond-purchasing program.</p> <p>As of 9:32 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 53.3 points, or 0.35%, to 15675, the S&P 500 gained 8.5 points, or 0.48%, to 1783 and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 28.4 points, or 0.69%, to 4084.</p>

Stocks were battered on Monday, with investors fleeing equities after factory data cast a negative light on the economy. Article Link: Stocks unravel after factory report

After a blistering four-month rally that took stocks to record highs last year, January could not have been more different, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell more than 5%. In the first month of the year, traders worried the financial health of both the U.S. and smaller nations meant stocks were too dangerous to continue owning for the time being, especially after a nearly uninterrupted rise that began in early 2009. Those jitters continued on the first trading day in February, driven by weakness in a manufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management. By the close of...

The gap between the rich and poor continues to grow. The wealthiest 1 percent held 8 percent of the economic pie in 1975 but now hold over 20 percent. This is a striking change from the 1950s and 1960s when their share of all incomes was slightly over 10 percent. A study by Emmanuel Saez found that between 2009 and 2012 the real incomes of the top 1 percent jumped 31.4 percent. The richest 10 percent now receive 50.5 percent of all incomes, the largest share since data was first recorded in 1917. The wealthiest are becoming disproportionally wealthier at...

This is a very educational show put on by Kin Greenhouse of "It's Rainmaking Time". She is one of the very few who eschew the soundbite driven media economy and chooses the long format, deep dive approach. While it may be too long for ADD crowd, it digs deep into a not so simple subject to foster understanding and comprehension. This was a pretty good show with an interesting cast of guests:

Ben S. Bernanke ascended to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve eight years ago as a little-known — albeit distinguished — Princeton economics professor who had notched just three years of federal public service. When he takes his leave this week, having presided over his final meeting of the Fed’s policy-making committee, he will depart as one of the finest chairmen in the institution’s hundred year history, having played a central role in averting a financial meltdown and lifting the nation out of recession.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday another $10 billion cut in its monthly bond purchases in a statement that attributed the decision to “growing underlying strength in the broader economy.” The statement, published after a two-day meeting of the Fed’s policy-making committee, reflected the optimism of Fed officials that the economy is finally poised for faster growth after years of false starts and setbacks. It was the committee’s first unanimous decision since 2011. The Fed said it would expand its holdings of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities by $65 billion in February, down from $75 billion in January and $85...

The United States has become more and more defensive against China because of its rapid development and the change of the comparison of strength between the two countries. "China Threat" theory increasingly attracts much more attention from the US media. Chinese political and economics author Lei Sihai believes that the United States is actively pursuing a "currency war" against China through a puppetry of elaborate political, military and media maneuvering. Using financial instruments as "direct weapons," Lei claims that the United States is gearing up to engage China in a currency battle come 2015 in his new book The Decisive...