monetary policy

Here is the video everyone is talking about, Ron Paul and Paul Krugman debating the economy and economic policy. Enjoy.

The GDP numbers for the US came out again and they were weaker than anticipated, coming in at 2.2% for real GDP growth instead of the 2.5% expected. Nominal GDP growth was only 3.7%. That is not bullish for shares.

Last month PIMCO founder and Chief Investment Officer Bill Gross said PIMCO sees a mortgage-backed QE3 from the Fed as likely. As a result, Pimco has increased its exposure to these. He spoke to Bloomberg television yesterday about how his…

I have noted a number of times in the past that household debt levels in Canada have reached worrying levels. I am not the only one on to this. Canadian central bank head Mark Carney was in the news yesterday sounding the alarm on this as…

The FDR moment occurred in 1933 when FDR took the reigns of monetary policy from an ineffective Fed and sparked a robust recovery in aggregate demand. The Fed had allowed aggregate demand to collapse for three years when FDR responded. He…

The Fed is out of bullets on interest rate policy and has turned to other nonconventional measures like quantitative easing. Excess reserves have piled up as a result. What does this mean for inflation and the economy?

Today's big news was the bond auction in Spain. Spain's auction went off without a hitch but at a cost. Spain sold 2.5 bln euros ($3.3 billion USD). The Spanish Treasury sold a 1.1 bln euro bond maturing 31 Oct 2014 (average yield: 3.463%,…

Quantitative easing hasn't worked to lower interest rates in the past but has caused a huge uproar from those opposed to the policy in the US. QE is therefore both ineffective and politically-charged. But a lot of people still expect it.

The debate over another round of asset purchases seems to be getting less play than the debate over guidance, and the real Troika of BYD (Bernanke, Yellen and Dudley) are reading from the same song book. They are maintaining the view of…

Given a clearly overbought market, the re-emergence of Europe's sovereign debt problem and the Fed reducing the imminence of QE3, even the bulls concede that a correction is likely. Overall, however, investors remain optimistic, and are…