Free Republic

I've always avoided reporting on the Federal Reserve. I know it's more important than much of the stuff I cover, but it's so boring. How can I succeed on TV reporting on the Fed? Fed chairs even work at being dull. Alan Greenspan said he tried to be obscure because he didn't want to spook markets. He called his obfuscation "Fedspeak." It's a far cry from the clarity of his language -- and principles -- when he was young and a disciple of libertarian Ayn Rand. Outgoing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his likely successor, Janet Yellen, are almost as...

Senator Rand Paul has already threatened to put a hold on the nomination of Janet Yellen, President Obama’s choice to replace Ben Bernanke at the helm of the Federal Reserve. The Kentucky Republican says he is willing to vote in favor of Yellen, but only if he gets a vote on a bi-partisan bill that he’s sponsored to put the Fed under greater congressional oversight and public scrutiny. … Although Yellen is still expected to win confirmation, the process is now expected to be contentious. Many Republicans, not just Paul, have consistently criticized the central bank’s aggressive monetary policy and...

WASHINGTON — Inflation is widely reviled as a kind of tax on modern life, but as Federal Reserve policy makers prepare to meet this week, there is growing concern inside and outside the Fed that inflation is not rising fast enough. Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment. The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the...

The European Union’s financial services chief warned of tit-for-tat action if the United States pushes ahead with plans to impose extra capital requirements on foreign banks. In December, Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo said foreign banks should be required to hold as much capital as their U.S. counterparts, regardless of how their overseas parent companies are funded. The EU fears this will fragment global capital markets and its financial services commissioner Michel Barnier said big European banks were as well-capitalized as American banks. “I don’t want to be forced to do the same as the Americans,” Barnier told reporters...

Complete Title:Alan Greenspan: What Went Wrong The Former Fed chairman on Where the Economy Went Wrong, Where He Went wrong—and Ayn Rand. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, goes to a lot of parties. He and his wife, the TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, "sort of get invited everywhere," he says, sitting in front of the long bay window in his office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Lately, though, cocktails and dinners seem to have guest lists drawn almost exclusively from one political party or the other. "It used to be a ritualistic 50-50 at parties—the doyennes...

When President Obama nominated Janet Yellen to be the next Chair of the Federal Reserve Board the praise he offered was similar to what had already poured in from around the country. In their assessments of Ms. Yellen's long career, Congressman, editors, and academics have underscored how her prescience and caution distinguish her from the reckless overconfidence that have plagued her male colleagues at the Federal Reserve. As proof of her wisdom supporters have pointed to speeches she delivered in 2005 and 2006 in which she supposedly issued clear warnings about the dangers then building in the frothy real estate...

The nomination of Janet Yellen to become head of the Federal Reserve System has set off a flurry of media stories. Since she will be the first woman to occupy that position, we can only hope that this will not mean that any criticism of what she does will be attributed to sex bias or to a "war on women." The Federal Reserve has become such a major player in the American economy that it needs far more scrutiny and criticism than it has received, regardless of who heads it. Ms. Yellen, a former professor of economics at Berkeley, has...

Bob Woodward said that sequestration was Obama's & Lew's idea. Why now is Obama againt it? Why was he for it before he was against it? Why does he flip-flop on his CORE beliefs (raising the debt ceiling, the individual mandate, sequestration, etc)? Not secondary or tertiary beliefs...core beliefs. And why is Lew fearmongering over the debt ceiling? What he has said about it recently has been debunked by Moody's.

Federal Reserve chair nominee Janet Yellen Wednesday suggested that she will put a renewed emphasis on “jobs” in her role as Chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. President Obama nominated Yellen, a vice chairwoman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, to run the U.S. central bank Wednesday. If confirmed by the Senate, Yellen will become the first woman to run the Fed in its hundred-year history. Yellen is expected to accelerate the devaluation of the dollar by continuing or even expanding the...

President Barack Obama will nominate Federal Reserve vice chair Janet Yellen to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the nation’s central bank, the White House said Tuesday. Yellen would be the first woman to head the powerful Fed, taking over at a pivotal time for the economy and the banking industry. … Yellen emerged as the leading candidate after Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary whom Obama was thought to favor, withdrew from consideration last month in the face of rising opposition. Yellen, 67, would likely continue steering Fed policy in the same direction as Bernanke. A close ally of...

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Thursday that a failure to raise the U.S. debt ceiling could "very seriously damage" the global economy. "The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy," Lagarde said in a speech at George Washington University ahead of the 2013 World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings. "So it is 'mission-critical' that this be resolved as soon as possible," she added. Referring to the anticipated tapering of Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program, Lagarde...

The Treasury Department has begun using the last set of accounting maneuvers at its disposal to allow the government to keep paying its bills until Congress raises the country’s borrowing limit, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told congressional leaders Tuesday night. In a letter, Lew reiterated that if the debt ceiling is not raised by Oct. 17 the government will not be able to meet all its financial commitments, such as making payments to U.S. debt holders, government contractors and Social Security recipients “If we have insufficient cash on hand, it would be impossible for the United States of America to...

In 64 A.D., in a naïve attempt to deceive the populace, Nero decreased the silver content in the coins and made silver and gold coins slightly smaller ... central planners have been clipping coins and devaluing the The People’s hard-earned currency for at least two thousand years. The Roman Emperor Nero of course devalued the Roman currency for the first time in the Empire’s history. What was it that gave both the Roman and Ottoman Empires the audacity to plunder the purchasing power of their people? After 200 years of operating as an independent bank, what made the British Empire...

Chase Bank is in trouble on three separate fronts that I want to relay to you. Sadly though, nobody is going to jail for the continued criminality. First up, Chase is facing charges of fraud in the sales of bonds in mortgage markets. The feds are seeking fines of roughly $20 billion. As you might expect, Chase is pushing back. We'll see if this charges winds up only amounting to a silly civil action, or if finally the government will get some backbone and issue indictments. Now, you may say, what do I care what Chase did to rich people...

With Larry Summers withdrawing from the race for Federal Reserve chair, current Fed vice chair Janet Yellen has pulled into the lead to become Ben Bernanke’s replacement. Previous to her current appointment, Yellen served as president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank The SF Fed’s district includes three of the worst states in the housing crisis – California, Arizona and Nevada. I think its fair to say that without the housing boom and bust in these states we wouldn’t have had a mortgage crisis. Given that Yellen was the top banking regulator for this geography, one has to wonder...

There was a time, long ago, when some still believed the myth that the Federal Reserve, and the selection of its Chairman, were supposed to be apolitical and impartial. Luckily, that was a long time ago, because otherwise some may question not only the logic, but the motives, behind what the media reports is an aggressive push by White House officials to "muster support among Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee to back Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen," according to Reuters which cited three sources said on Friday, laying the groundwork for her expected nomination to the Fed's top...

This much has been determined yesterday -- The Fed could not handle a 2.8% 10 year Treasury rate. Nor could it handle any further increases. But consideration of the impact of this policy on the common man, along with the destruction of purchasing power and outright theft from the people who produce the services (and few goods remaining) in this nation was damned -- exactly as has been the case for the last three decades. What Bernanke did yesterday was guarantee a crash. He guaranteed it because he took what was a clear opportunity to take what had been priced...

Ben Bernanke just pulled the biggest fake out in the history of the market. Now he and the Fed will have to pay for it. The Federal Reserve's exit from its bond-buying experiment in monetary policy was never going to be pretty. It just got a lot messier. If you were watching the market on Wednesday afternoon, you might have gotten the impression that the Fed made another great move. The Dow shot up over 150 points on news that the Fed was not in fact going to pull back on its bond purchases. But if you were watching Ben...

More pain at the pump for the middle class, but according to Wall Street this is a good thing.

Canadian billionaire businessman Ned Goodman predicts the end of the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency. He predicts the transition out of the U.S. Dollar will become, "...quite ugly." He delivered the lecture at Cambridge House's Toronto Resource Investment Conference 2013 on Thursday, September 12, 2013.