The unspoken claim of central bank policy is that risk can be extinguished by intervention/manipulation: once the Fed has your back, i.e. is supporting the market, risk disappears, and the easy profits flow to those who buy the dips with…
The Wells Fargo bank account scandal took center stage in the news last week and in all likelihood will continue to make headlines for many weeks to come. What Wells Fargo employees did in opening bank accounts without customers’ authorization […]
In her recent address at the Jackson Hole monetary policy conference, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen suggested that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates by the end of the year. Markets reacted favorably to Yellen’s suggested rate […]
The fact that central banks provide welfare for the wealthy is now entering the mainstream. The fact that all central bank policies since 2008 have dramatically increased wealth and income inequality is now grudgingly being accepted as reality by mainstream…
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…
I recently proposed that the liberty movement capitalize on Brexit with “Fed-exit”: a campaign to “secede” from the Federal Reserve. Fed-exit could be accomplished with a few simple policy changes.Passing Audit the Fed is a good first step […]
It’s no secret that virtually every pension fund is dead man walking, doomed by central banks’ imposition of low yields on safe investments, i.e. Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP). Given that both The Economist and The Wall Street Journal have…
Is anyone else fed up with the Federal Reserve? To paraphrase Irving Fisher’s famous quote about the stock market just before it crashed in 1929, we’ve reached a permanently high plateau of Fed mismanagement, Fed worship and Fed failure. The…
History has shifted, and we’re leaving the era of central bank convergence and entering the era of central bank divergence, i.e. open conflict. In the good old days circa 2009-2014, central banks acted in concert to flood the global banking…
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve left its target federal funds rate unchanged. Paul-Martin Foss at the Carl Menger Center for the Study of Money and Banking explains:
Another rate hike is expected at the earliest at the June FOMC meeting, with the […]
Workers of all ages are caught in a vise. Older workers need to keep working longer in an economy which values younger workers (and their cheaper healthcare premiums). Younger workers are caught in the vice of “you don’t have enough…
After decades of denial, the mainstream has finally conceded that rising income and wealth inequality is a problem–not just economically, but politically, for as we all know wealth buys political influence/favors, and as we’ll see below, the federal government enables…
Foreign exchange (FX) is a zero-sum game: if one currency weakens, another must strengthen. Since the value of a currency is relative to other currencies, all currencies can’t weaken together: at least one currency must strengthen as others weaken. That…
While all eyes on fixated on global stock markets as the measure of “prosperity” and “growth” (or is it hubris?), the larger force at work beneath the dovish cooing of central bankers is foreign exchange: the relative value of nations’…
In a landmark infrastructure bill passed in December, Congress finally penetrated the Fed’s “independence” by tapping its reserves and bank dividends for infrastructure funding. The bill was a start. But some experts, including Congressional candidate Tim Canova, say Congress should…