Free Republic

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.