Free Republic

The U.S. Federal Reserve just pulled off something stealthy — over four days last week, without fanfare, the Fed vacuumed up $43.6 billion in U.S. Treasurys. That’s $8.8 billion in long-dated 30-year bonds on May 8 alone, plus another $34.8 billion earlier in the week. Not exactly small change. Quietly returning to the quantitative-easing trough isn’t standard Fed housekeeping — it’s like a bank robber returning to the scene because he forgot his car keys. Let’s talk straight: This isn’t tightening. It’s stealth easing. It’s monetary policy on tiptoes. Some traders have begun to notice, and smart investors should too....

Inflation risk has been a significant topic of discussion in the mainstream media for the last few years. Such is unsurprising given that inflation spiked following the pandemic in 2020 as consumer spending (demand) was shot into overdrive from stimulus payments and production (supply) was shuttered. To understand why that occurred, we need to revisit “Economics 101.”“In economics, inflation is a general increase in the prices of goods and services. Changes in inflation are a function of fluctuations in actual demand for goods and services (also known as demand shocks, including changes in fiscal or monetary policy or recession), changes...

The Federal Reserve may have to make an emergency rate cut soon. Inflation has fallen to the lowest levels since 2020. If this continues, it will be a BIG problem.

The giant investment company's global influence on politics and economics is enormous. BlackRock is one of the most powerful organizations in the world, and its nefarious role in global economics and politics is becoming more apparent. The investment giant is pushing woke politics in the form of corporate social credit scores (ESG), which includes the dangerous “net zero” and LGBT agenda. BlackRock is also responsible for rigging the financial systems and has control over a significant portion of the world’s wealth. In order to fight back, we need to know what we are dealing with. In this article, we take...

Narrator: Are you in a debt hole so deep you can never climb out? Are all your credit cards maxed out, and are you applying for yet another card just so you can cover living expenses? Does your mortgage payment eat up half your monthly paycheck? Are you still carrying thousands of dollars of student loan debt 10 years or more after you graduated? Or are you a business owner paying so much on your loans that the bank makes more profit from your business than you do? Well, now there’s an answer! Businesses and private citizens can now take...

Why are CEOs and corporate insiders selling their stocks at a far faster rate than we have ever seen before? Do they know something that the rest of us do not? If stock prices are going to continue soaring into the stratosphere like many in the mainstream media are suggesting, these insiders that are dumping stocks like there is no tomorrow will miss out on some absolutely enormous profits. On the other hand, if a colossal market crash is coming in 2022, then 2021 was absolutely the perfect time to get out. As I have said countless times before, you...

Powell to speak amid issues with QE acceleration, China, protests, riots & Twitter wars. On Friday, May 29, at 11:00 AM ET. Webcast.....

During a press conference on Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that the Federal Reserve is taking drastic action to cushion the economy from the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak that has become a pandemic. According to Trump, the Federal Reserve will drop the interest rate to near zero.  "The effects of the coronavirus will weigh on economic activity in the near term and pose risks to the economic outlook. In light of these developments, the Committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate to 0 to 1/4 percent," the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement. "The...

Stocks are lurching toward fresh records to commence the first trading day in 2020, but that advance has raised some questions about the run-up in values for broad-market U.S. equity benchmarks. Indeed, the S&P 500’s recent gains have taken it to its priciest level relative to its hourly cost for the average worker on record. By that measure, Tuesday’s climb by the S&P 500 SPX, +0.84% to a peak at 3,250.04 would mean that the average employee, at an hourly wage of $28.29, would need to work 114.88 hours to buy a single unit of the index, representing one of...

Stocks were on track Thursday to set fresh closing records, unfazed by President Donald Trump’s impeachment and finding support in the interim U.S.-China trade deal and improvements in the global economic outlook. What are stock indexes doing? The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, rose 125 points, or 0.4%, to 28,364, while the S&P 500 index SPX gained 13 points, or 0.4%, at 3,204. The Nasdaq Composite index COMP added 51 points, a gain of 0.6%, at 8,879. All three major benchmark stock indexes set new intraday highs Thursday morning. On Wednesday, the Dow and S&P 500 snapped a five-day winning...

<p>New York (AFP) - The New York Federal Reserve Bank said Friday it will continue to inject billions into the US financial plumbing on a daily basis through November 4, extending the operations by three weeks.</p> <p>The effort, begun in mid-September, is aimed at preventing a spike in short-term interest rates, the New York Fed said in a statement.</p>

Fed Admits Failure of ‘Plan A’ to Control Money Market Rates, Shifts Back to Repos (which was ‘Plan A’ till 2008) The hullabaloo in the repo market torpedoed the function of Interest on Excess Reserves and forced the Fed to go back to the future. With its announcement this morning, the New York Fed confirmed that the Fed’s Plan A of manipulating the federal funds rate into its target range – now between 1.75% and 2.0% — has miserably failed, and that it will switch to Plan B to control short-term interest rates. But this Plan B used to...

President Donald Trump is calling on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by at least a full percentage point "over a fairly short period of time," saying that such an action would make the U.S. economy even better and would also "greatly and quickly" enhance the global economy. In two tweets Monday, Trump kept up his pressure on the Fed and its chairman Jerome Powell, saying the U.S. economy was strong "despite the horrendous lack of vision by Jay Powell and the Fed." Powell is Trump's hand-picked choice for the top Fed job. He said Democrats were trying to...

For years central banks had been keeping rates near 0%, or below, and at the same time printing over a hundred billion dollars’ worth of fiat currencies each and every month to purchase bonds and stocks. That is all changing now. ... fourteen major global central banks are either in the process right now, or have indicated that they be will next year, in the process of raising interest rates. At the same time, QE on a global net basis will plunge from $180 billion per month at its peak during 2017, to $0 by December…and will then go negative...

I recently had the opportunity to read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin, a prodigious tome dealing with the circumstances surrounding the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. I was taken aback by some of its provocative assertions. America joined World War I largely to help a few bankers profit off the war (despite a long-standing Monroe doctrine that prohibited our involvement in European affairs) The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was supported by international financial interests in order to destabilize Russia and steal the wealth of the Russian people; and So-called "foreign aid" is merely a...

Financial expert Lior Gantz says there is good news and bad news for the economy with the election of Donald Trump. Gantz explains, “If he changes the equation, it could cause a lot of inflation in the U.S. U.S. banks are so liquid and have so much excess cash because of TARP programs and QE programs that this could prompt them to start lending, and lend to the wrong people. It could prompt the government to start issuing increased food stamps, universal unemployment checks and all kinds of stuff that can create large inflation in the U.S. So, that is...

While many of us in the alternative media and especially those researchers of Clinton crimes are breathing a big fat sigh of relief that anybody but Hillary is headed to the White House in 2017, Brandon Smith of Alt Market is warning us all not to get too comfortable… and with history on his side here, we should listen to him. Despite what looked like a rigged, fraudulent Hillary win orchestrated from the top down with the entire establishment machine behind her, Trump won the election. In an election year that would have otherwise seen record low voter turnout, the...

The Fed has not only failed to fix what's broken in the U.S. economy--it has actively mad those problems worse. The Federal Reserve claims its monetary interventions saved America from economic ruin in 2009, and have bolstered growth ever since. Don't hurt yourself patting your own backs, Fed governors past and present: it's bad enough that the Fed can't fix the economy's real problems--its policies actively make them worse. After seven long years of politicos and the financial media glorifying the Federal Reserve's policies as god-like in their power and efficacy, let's take a quick look at the results of...

We live in strange economic times, stranger perhaps than at any other point in history. Since 2007-2008, the globally intertwined and dependent fiscal system has suffered considerable declines in every conceivable area. Manufacturing around the world is in a slump, from Japan to China to Europe, with the minimal manufacturing accomplished in the U.S. also fading. Consumption is falling, most notably in petroleum and raw materials. Employment is truly dismal, with the U.S. posting over 94 million people as “non-participants” in the national work force. High paying jobs are disappearing, and the only jobs replacing them are in the...

Computer automated hedge fund strategies weren't the only winners amid recent volatility. Hedge funds also appear to have timed oil’s recent slump and rebound. That's according to Bloomberg's Moming Zhou, who reports  that hedge fund significantly curbed their bearish positions in crude oil just after it fell to a 12-year low last week -- and then rebounded in its biggest jump since 2008. While oil had a brutal start to 2016 after a disappointing 2015 showing, many are coming around to the idea of a recovery in prices, as Citi argued it could be the trade of the year, some...