Free Republic

By opening the door wider to an interest-rate cut in September, the Federal Reserve is on a collision course with the presidential election. For a central bank that judiciously aspires to stay above the fray of partisan politics, confronting a potential policy shift around election time amounts to a lose-lose. Delivering a rate cut ahead of the election could rile up Republicans and former President Donald Trump, but withholding a needed reduction could undermine the economy and upset Democrats. The awkward optics give extra incentive for central bank officials in the coming weeks to set expectations for and explain the...

The Federal Reserve is Running on Empty. ‘What passes for central banking today is really a perverse form of Wall Street-pleasing monetary manipulation. It employs the vocabulary of central banking, but in practice it fundamentally undermines main street prosperity, even as it showers the 1% (the top wealthiest people) with unspeakable financial windfalls. Stated differently, virtually everything the Fed does for the alleged benefit of the American economy is both unnecessary and a ruse. The Fed has actually become a captive of the Wall Street traders, gamblers and high rollers, and functions mainly at their behest. The proof of this...

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” claimed it was former President Donald Trump’s “bank regulation reliefs” that needed to be rolled back to protect against more banks collapsing like Silicon Valley Bank last week.Warren said, “The way to understand this crisis is that it has three players. The first is Congress and President Trump, who says, let’s weaken the regulation, which hit really hard. The second part is the regulators themselves and, in particular, the Fed and Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, who took that change in the laws and he...

The Federal Reserve Chairman’s testimony to Congress next week is likely to be very succinct and can be summed up neatly as ” the risks of doing too little are far greater than the risks of doing too much,” economists said Friday. “The Fed is getting a little more hawkish than we pictured them at the end of last year,” said Michael Gregory, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets. Powell will testify on Tuesday to the Senate Banking Committee and on Wednesday to the House Financial Services panel. Both hearings are set to begin at 10 a.m. Eastern. Recent...

Rapidly rising food, housing, medical, and tuition prices are squeezing Americans, and many do not understand the real cause of their falling living standards...That confusion opens the door for opportunistic politicians who promise supposed freebies to ease the pain of inflation. Many, unfortunately, succumb to this siren’s call.Perverse as it is, the policies offered to people suffering from inflation create even more inflation. In other words, inflation has a way of perpetuating itself, much like a heroin addiction.We are already seeing cockamamie schemes in the US, like “inflation relief checks,” which attempt to solve the problems of inflation by creating...

In response to your recent December news release statement concerning “Principles for Climate-Related Financial Risk Management for Large Financial Institutions” and request for public comments, I have the following comment to your board. The intended purpose of the Federal Reserve is formulating U.S. monetary policy through the control of currency and interest rates, as well as promoting financial stability through the regulating of financial institutions. If members of the Federal Reserve are so concerned about climate, environmental and energy policies, then I strongly suggest that those members resign from the Federal Reserve. These former members could then simply seek other...

<p>Profits and losses aren’t usually thought of as a consideration for central banks, but rapidly mounting red ink at the Federal Reserve and many peers risks becoming more than just an accounting oddity.</p><p>The bond market is enduring its worst selloff in a generation, triggered by high inflation and the aggressive interest-rate hikes that central banks are implementing. Falling bond prices, in turn, mean paper losses on the massive holdings that the Fed and others accumulated during their rescue efforts in recent years.</p>

If you owe someone more than 600 bucks, then get the checkbook out and start drafting out some 599.99 "Biden Legal Tender" until you have enough to pay them then write the remainder on the last check.

Yet another overpriced 'starter-home' in the city I grew up in that recently sold at nearly 20% over the asking price... 830k for 1.8k sf. The house last sold for 300k in 2008. What's particularly sad is that Melrose was once a blue-collar middle class city in which the children of residents eagerly wished to remain. Prices have been on a tear since 2012, but they, like those everywhere else, have been accelerating rapidly since the plandemic. I would like to especially thank our clueless, arrogant, obnoxious elites at the Federal Reserve (yes, you JPow), the arrogant, entrenched executives at...

The war of words unleashed on Wall Street and in Washington by Wednesday’s announcement of an unexpectedly high rate of consumer price inflation is escalating by the day. Legendary hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller had warned on Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal that the Fed was enabling fiscal and market excesses by not standing up to the political whims of Congress; he stated on CNBC that the Fed’s overly accommodative monetary policies posed a risk to the status of the United States dollar as a global reserve currency. Refuting such concerns, Paul Krugman asks today in his column for...

- CPI surged 0.8% MoM (4 times the +0.2% expected) and exploded 4.2% YoY. That is the biggest YoY jump since Sept 2008 (and biggest MoM jump since June 2008). - The core CPI rose 3.0% over the past 12 months; this was its largest 12-month increase since January 1996. - This spooked investors. Contracts for the Nasdaq 100, which is dominated by technology, fell sharply, while those for the benchmark S&P 500 also declined significantly.

Share Article via Email Inflation accelerated at its fastest pace in more than 12 years for April as the U.S. economic recovery kicked into gear and energy prices jumped higher, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. The Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods as well as energy and housing costs, rose 4.2% from a year ago, compared to the Dow Jones estimate for a 3.6% increase. The monthly gain was 0.8%, against the expected 0.2%.

...."Credit Suisse analyst Zoltan Pozsar recently summed up the situation in a report, saying: “The banking system is running out of balance sheet. Soon there will be too much cash.”

p>“Prices for products containing silver will change EFFECTIVE October 13, 2020…re-setting silver prices is necessary”…(by Half Dollar) No inflation, huh?The US Mint even says below, to “cover rising costs”.Regardless, here’s a little dandy that the US Mint would probably like to keep as much under wraps as possible.From just today:From the Federal Register:Here’s the PDF of the government’s entry in the register, and, specifically, the products that are affected.And here’s the table from the PDF file:That’s $67 for each uncirculated Silver Eagle?Notice that while these coins are one step above, for example, a “tube of Eagles”, these are not necessarily coins that one may think...

Today we got a taste of things to come when White House China hawk Peter Navarro stated to the press that the US-China trade deal was “over”. Cue a plunge in stocks and in CNY and in bond yields and general risk off. Then cue the inevitable rapid winding-back of those comments from Navarro and Kudlow and Trump, with the former saying his comments had been taken “wildly out of context” (they hadn’t given he was talking about the total collapse of US trust in China) and the latter tweeting “The China Trade Deal is fully intact. Hopefully they will...

If there's one thing the Chinese can count on from their government, it's theft. For millennia, the unelected despots of China have robbed their people of their money. The communists are doing it today. There are four state banks in China, and there is no other place that is allowed to take money on deposit. These banks pay virtually no interest, and no deposit in any bank controlled by communists is safe. If the government needs to, it'll just take it. All this money is being used right now in service of whatever goal the communists choose. There is no...

The latest jobs report revealing record U.S. unemployment highlights a growing rift investors are struggling to reconcile: a rallying stock market and stumbling economy. Gains in U.S. stocks accelerated Friday after April’s nonfarm payrolls report showed unemployment rose to 14.7%, the highest level on record. It was the latest head-scratching development for many market observers, who have been parsing a steady stream of abysmal economic data while watching the U.S. stock market stage a recovery. [SNIP] Many analysts are looking past the grim economic data, forecasting a speedy recovery as state economies open back up across the country. New York,...

DOW futures down -305 at the time this was posted.

On Thursday, knowing that a three-day Easter weekend was coming and the attention of the public would be elsewhere, the Federal Reserve announced that it would allow two of its emergency lending programs to begin buying junk bonds. Those are bonds with less than an investment-grade credit rating, meaning they have a greater likelihood of defaulting. The Fed is not simply accepting junk bonds as collateral for loans, it will actually be buying junk bonds — potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of them. Two of the popular junk bond ETFs, iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (symbol HYG)...

Okay, I’ve been trying to do some research as to when “The Dafficit” (Hat tip to Daffy Jim Sasser) became a thing. About the only people nuttier than gold bugs and audit the fed crack pots. Country will never be broke, it can do something you or I CAN’T do. So when did this political-financial flim-flam get started and who did so?