Entrepreneurs fret daily over economic uncertainty. Case in point: Even with passage of the lame-duck tax deal, they still don’t know what their tax burden will be two years from now. Approval of that deal lifted what The Wall Street Journal dubs the “world of the temporary tax code” to unprecedented heights. The Journal explains: […]
Did you see Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on 60 Minutes the other night? Bernanke portrayed the Federal Reserve as the great protector of the U.S. economy, he claimed that unemployment would be 15 percent higher if the Federal Reserve had sat back and done nothing during the financial crisis and he even started laying […]
The political ground has been shifting rapidly ever since the American people delivered a vote of no confidence on the current direction of public policy when they went to the polls earlier this month. Nowhere is that shift more evident than in the recent release of a bipartisan plan to dramatically reform the nation’s health […]
Washington (AP) – The economy grew a little faster over the summer than the government first thought. That modest pickup wasn’t nearly enough to significantly lower the nation’s high unemployment rate, and the Federal Reserve doesn’t expect the economy to improve much over the next couple of years. The economy expanded at a 2.5 percent […]
Almost two weeks ago an unidentified missile was launched from somewhere off the coast of Los Angeles, and wide speculation as to what the hell it was has followed. A leading theory is that a Chinese missile launched from a submarine. The Chinese have spent the last 30 years building their army and economy and […]
Citi’s crack FX strategist Steve Englander reacts to Bernanke’s big speech where he slammed China, and concludes that Bernanke is committed to a lower dollar. Thus: You should be a seller. Here’s Englander: We would sell the dollar off this speech. It is hard enough stop a central bank from weakening its currency when it […]
Bucking the Federal Reserve’s efforts to push interest rates lower, investors are selling off U.S. government debt, driving rates in many cases to their highest levels in more than three months. The Fed’s $600 billion program to buy Treasury bonds began late last week and is kicking into high gear this week, with the central […]
The latest move by Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way. Bernanke plans to inject more liquidity into US markets in the latest round of quantitative easing, which is being dubbed QE2 (we’ll get to what it actually means in a minute). While there has been a […]
Bank stocks went up after Obama’s so-called financial reform speech. That’s probably because his bill institutionalizes “too big to fail.” It doesn’t break up the banks and it assures them access to Federal Reserve loans as needed. It makes bailouts permanent. The Goldman Sachs scandal exposes a deep flaw in the bill that we believe […]
Even as prospects for the American economy brighten, consumers are about to face a new financial burden: a sustained period of rising interest rates. That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession. The shift […]
