It would seem that he’s in someone’s pocket, very deeply so.
Am I wrong in thinking that speech could start a sell off? Seriously, that scared me.
He was commenting on events that have already transpired, so he’s giving the markets no new information. In any case, his commentary seemed to try to allay fears that the subprime crisis would spread to the rest of the economy. Why would this start a sell-off? And BTW, I don’t think a speech by *anyone* in history, including Fed chairmen, has ever started a sell-off.
That auction scared the Fed. Finally...finally, the Fed realized that they had gone too far for too long being too tight on the money supply in their effort to burst the housing bubble.
The credit crunch had grown so severe that investors weren't even buying T-Bills!
Suddenly, the Fed decided that the screams from the Secondary Market about a "credit crunch" were real, after all.
Fed monetary policy eased mid-meeting after that point. I had already started my countdown to the point of no return being on October the 15th (had the Fed not injected money into the system prior to then, it would have been 1929 all over again).
The U.S. was pushed to the brink of economic collapse. It was a "near run thing" to quote a late Civil war general.