monetary policy

by Comstock Partners The current market rally is not based on a self-sustained typical economic recovery, but on blind faith that the Fed can pull out a magic wand and cure everything with another round of quantitative easing (QE2). As we…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession  (McGraw-Hill, 2009). On Friday, October 15, 2010, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S.…

I was on BBC Radio Five Live at about 4AM local time this morning for a good 5 to 10 minutes, talking about the coalition government's austerity budget. My basic message was that austerity-lite might be defensible but full austerity is…

A few months ago I was running through some out of the box thinking for how the Fed might be able to give quantitative easing more of an impact. Not that I think the Fed should go QE, but if they do, the question is what should they do.…

This is the Golden Age of Fed Watching. And we’ve done our fair share. On a day when we have speeches from 5 Fed presidents and 1 governor, what more is there to say that hasn’t already been said? Faith in the Fed is high, and capital…

by L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Research Director with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability and Senior Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute. Fed Chairman…

John Hussman has a piece out today that dissects the current economic environment in two parts. In part one, Hussman puts a spotlight on quantitative easing (QE) and why it is unlikely to have the intentioned effect on the U.S. economy. And…

Anticipation of QEII in the US remains among the most potent forces in the capital markets.   Bernanke's pre-weekend speech and two dovish speeches since--Evans and Rosengren (both voting members of the FOMC).  The case the…

The Fed’s intent is not to create consumer inflation, but rather asset inflation — primarily in the equity market.  By pulling longer-term bond yields lower, the Fed hopes that this will alter how investors value equities relative…

by Edward Hugh For reasons which aren’t worth going into now, I’m reading through a recent report by Deutsche Bank Global Markets Research entitled “From The Golden To The Grey Age” this afternoon. The report (all 100 pages of it, many…