Free Republic

On Tuesday, August 11, China began devaluing its currency unit, the yuan against the U.S. dollar. Later that day, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump denounced China, saying: "I think you have to do something to rein in China. They devalued their currency today. They're making it absolutely impossible for the United States to compete, and nobody does anything." For a candidate whose pitch is based upon being smarter than everyone else, Trump has taken a spectacularly stupid position with respect to China-not just economically, but politically. After all, it was less than three years ago that Mitt Romney threw away...

One of the most curiously persistent surrealisms of Washington, DC is the reflexive deference given the Federal Reserve System. The Washington elite tends to accord more infallibility to the Fed than do Catholics the Pope.... [snip] The big question is whether Fed officials can get it right after years in which they have regularly predicted a stronger economy than the one that materialized... [snip] ...let’s be blunt. If NASA suffered from comparable inaccuracy the manned spaceflight program would have been shut down by an endless series of Challenger-type catastrophes many years ago. With forecasts this bad is it any wonder...

The amusement is strong from this one.... The economy has made great gains and is approaching an acceptable normal. Policy should shortly acknowledge this reality. The Fed took extraordinary policy measures in response to extraordinary economic conditions. Conditions are no longer extraordinary. Compared to earlier in the year, we know a lot more and can shelve some concerns. We appear to be past the most acute concerns of a spillover from Europe. I have more confidence in the resilience of the economy today compared to even a few months ago. I am much less concerned about a reversal of economic...

The idea that there's a trade-off between inflation and unemployment seems embedded in the Federal Reserve's psyche. The Fed has not increased its benchmark federal funds target rate since 2006. It's waiting to see if a tighter labor market will push up wages and prices, so the Fed can achieve both full employment and its inflation target of 2%. The Fed's adherence to a negatively sloped Phillips curve — predicting lower unemployment obtained by higher inflation — is a flawed model for monetary policy. Indeed, money doesn't even enter the analysis, because the implicit assumption is that inflation is caused...

For many months, economy watchers have been obsessed with "liftoff": the moment the Federal Reserve raises short-term interest rates, which have been held close to zero since late 2008. Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen has indicated that, if the economy grows as it has, that moment would come "at some point this year" - generally taken to mean either the September or December meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed's key decision-making body. Frankly, I've assumed that it's a done deal. The economy seems to be growing solidly, if not spectacularly. After a rough winter, gross domestic product...

Red State’s Erick Erickson dis-invited GOP presidential candidate and businessman Donald Trump after he insulted Fox News anchor and Thursday night’s debate moderator Megyn Kelly during a CNN interview Friday night. I have rescinded my invitation to Mr.Trump. While I have tried to give him great latitude, his remark about Megyn Kelly was a bridge too far — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 8, 2015 “Well I just don’t respect her as a journalist. I have no respect for her. I think she’s highly overrated. But when I came out there what was I doing I’m not getting paid for this....

LONDON (Reuters) - Americans and Britons bracing for their first interest rate rises in almost a decade are puzzled: why are rates about to go up when there's no inflation? Both the Federal Reserve and Bank of England are proclaiming that they are on the cusp of raising interest rates for the first time in almost a decade. It may take a few months, but the message they are sending still heavily-indebted households either side of the Atlantic is clear: 'be warned'. It's not hard to see why near-zero interest rates should be 'normalized' when you do a quick economic...

American teen employment has dropped 20 percent from the late 1980s, in part because more and more immigrants have flooded into the market to displace native-born kids from jobs in percentages far higher than on adults, according to the Federal Reserve. "The displacement effect of immigration on the employment of younger persons is much larger than on the employment of prime-age adults," said the September 2014 report, "Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects."

"Give me a one-handed economist!" Harry Truman once lamented. "All my economists say, on the one hand ... on the other hand ..." Though they're all economists themselves, Federal Reserve policymakers must be thinking along the same lines as they try to assess when to pull the trigger on the first interest rate hike in nearly a decade. On the one hand, the U.S. economy is sound. Hiring is robust, housing is finally picking up, consumers are shopping more, and even manufacturing may have stabilized after a series of shocks in the winter. On the other, fears about Greece exiting...

famed Fort Knox is a facility managed by the U.S. Mint. Curiously, however, in a recent exchange of e-mails with a gold investment blog, the former director of that agency demonstrates a disturbing lack of knowledge about the precious metal supposedly stored there. And the Federal Reserve may be hiding the location and value of the allegedly missing bullion. On July 1, Koos Jansen of goldseek.com published another in a series of posts exploring the fate of the gold allegedly kept in vaults at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In his latest article, Jansen makes some startling claims that if proven true,...

...Federal Reserve chair told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday the central bank is in no hurry to raise interest rates. Yellen once again stressed the word "patience." On Wednesday, she appears before the House of Representatives' Financial Services Committee. Yellen talked about a solid and improving economy but also about disappointing labor force participation and anemic wage growth. She said it would be several months before the Fed would boost rates. Stocks soared on the news with both the S&P 500 and Dow closing at record highs. The Nasdaq also saw healthy gains and is now less than 1%...

Earlier today, former AIG head Hank Greenberg's long-running legal battle of the US government came to a dramatic end when in a 75-page ruling, U.S. Court of Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler found that Greenberg was indeed correct in claiming the government overstepped its legal boundaries in its "unduly harsh treatment of AIG in comparison to other institutions" which was "misguided and had no legitimate purpose." But because “the question is not whether this treatment was inequitable or unfair, but whether the government’s actions created a legal right of recovery for AIG’s shareholders" Wheeler found that Greenberg was not owed any...

The lack of faith in central bank trustworthiness is spreading. First Germany, then Holland, and Austria, and now - as we noted was possible previously - Texas has enacted a Bill to repatriate $1 billion of gold from The NY Fed's vaults to a newly established state gold bullion depository..."People have this image of Texas as big and powerful … so for a lot of people, this is exactly where they would want to go with their gold," and the Bill includes a section to prevent forced seizure from the Federal Government. From 2011: "The University of Texas Investment Management...

While the country was focused on the McKinney, and the Dallas Police shooting, another huge incident was occuring in the Lone Star State. You actually may be able to call it the Lone Gold Depository State. On June 12, 2015, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill establishing the nation’s first state-level gold depository, an important first step towards gold and silver as commonly-used legal tender in the state. If proper measures are taken, Texas citizens could in fact use gold and silver for tender of payment through checks and paper money on new deposits. Legally speaking, gold and silver...

Anxiety over financial stability and shadow banking risks appear to have force Christine Lagarde and her fellow extrapolators to hit the panic button: -IMF CUTS U.S. 2015 GROWTH FORECAST TO 2.5% FROM 3.1% -FED SHOULD WAIT FOR TANGIBLE SIGNS OF WAGE, PRICE GAINS: IMF -DOLLAR `MODERATELY OVERVALUED, CURBING U.S. GROWTH, JOBS: IMF -IMF URGES FED TO DELAY FIRST RATE INCREASE UNTIL 1H 2016 Adding that they viewed the Dollar as "moderately overvalued" and any more appreciation would be "harmful," it seems global disinflationary pressures have left the IMF no choice but to say publicly what everyone has uttered under their...

The reason why Zero Hedge has been steadfast over the past 6 years in its accusation that the Fed is making a mockery of, and destroying not only the very fabric of capital markets (something which Citigroup now openly admits almost every week) but the US economy itself (as Goldman most recently hinted last week when it lowered its long-term "potential GDP" growth of the US by 0.5% to 1.75%), is simple: all along we knew we have been right, and all the career economists, Wall Street weathermen-cum-strategists, and "straight to CNBC" book-talking pundits were wrong. Not to mention the...

The uneven results of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy since the financial crisis should cause new thinking about how to conduct interest rate policy, said St. Louis Fed President James Bullard on Thursday in advocating for a new, controversial target. Standard economic theory predicted that the Fed’s decision to leave rates at zero and buy trillions of dollars of bonds would result in a consumption boom and above-average inflation, but that has not happened, sending economists back to the drawing board. Under Bullard’s proposal, the Fed would set an overall inflation target. In good times, the central bank would keep...

In all this talk about whether the economy will be strong enough to support the first policy change of this cycle, and how utterly sad it is to even have to argue about it, the larger issues about the exact operational framework remain largely unexamined. The intent of the FOMC is to undergo an orderly transition from extraordinary policy positions toward a setting more like normal. To go from A to B is not as simple as plugging in a new number, a fact that Federal Reserve officials are very quietly dealing with. The Fed has a repo problem, one...

The Federal Reserve drew up extensive plans for handling a U.S. debt default that included scheduling deferred payments and lending cash to investors, according to a lawmaker who cited Fed documents. America courted disaster in 2011 and 2013 when political fights over the national debt nearly left the federal government unable to pay its bills. Analysts and officials warned that missing payments could lead to economic calamity, and details have only slowly emerged over how financial officials braced for the unthinkable. In a June 2014 letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew seen by Reuters on Monday, Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday described stock market valuations as high and said the central bank was carefully monitoring their impact on financial stability. "I would highlight that equity market valuations at this point generally are quite high," Yellen said in conversation with Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, at an economics conference. Coupled with weak economic reports in the morning, her remarks drove stocks broadly lower in Wednesday trading. Yellen added, however, that the overall risks to financial stability are "moderated, not elevated" and she does not see the hallmarks of any bubbles. She...