» federal reserve

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal posted the results of its May Survey of economists. Naturally I charted some of the data, focusing on GDP, but I held off on sharing it until we got the latest Federal Reserve GDP projections, published at 2 PM today. Here’s a link to the Journal’...

The bad news is that commodities, and related commodity stocks from energy to miners, continue to be hammered due to the retraction of the liquidity pump by the Fed.  The decline in liquidity, the resurging crisis in Europe and general concerns about the U.S. economy is leading to commodities being...

There can be no doubt anymore that the global economic recovery is in trouble again. In the U.S. we can see it in the reversals of previously positive economic reports; unexpected declines in durable goods orders, industrial production, new home sales, existing home sales, new home starts, construct...

The Apple earnings report after the market closed yesterday put today’s markets into strong rally mode, and the Fed’s latest economic projection, released this afternoon, gave a further goose to the rally. The Fed’s 2012 GDP forecast “central tendency” range was raised ...

A subscriber asked about “Sell in May” seasonality for stocks depending on whether the Federal Reserve was tightening or loosening their policy stance. The specific Fed Funds target doesn’t have as much history as the Discount Rate, and the two move in tandem almost without exception; when o...

In his widely covered speech two weeks ago, Fed Chairman Bernanke said the anemic U.S. economic recovery seemed to be continuing, but that the Fed was suspicious of the positive employment reports of recent months. His actual words were “the better jobs numbers seem somewhat out of synch with the ...

Stock markets in Asia and Europe had their worst week of the year last week in response to unexpectedly negative economic news from China and the 17-nation eurozone. The U.S. stock market was disappointed and pulled back some last week on reports from the U.S. housing industry that were unexpectedly...

Ben Bernanke has said many times that Marriner Eccles, the head of the Federal Reserve in 1936/37 made a mistake by tightening credit (raising reserve requirements). Bernanke blames Eccles’s actions for the 50% stock market collapse in 1937 and the second leg of the depression that followed.Berna...

Bernanke is trying every way he can to get banks to lend (printing coupled with a multitude of lending facilities and Fed programs). It’s easy enough to prove the printing: Base money supply is up about $1.8 trillion since the start of the recession. The charts below offer a stunning narrative...

Aside from countless banks calling for QE3 which one has to wonder if their analysis may be slightly biased for personal gain the question remains will we see QE3. The November 2010 FOMC statement which launched QE2 made it clear why the Fed was expanding their balance sheet by $600 billion. “To p...

The pattern is by now so familiar that it deserves a place beside other technical indicators like moving averages and Fibonacci retracements. It begins with part or all of the global economy appearing to implode under its five-decade accumulation of debt. The public sector/central bank nexus respo...

Wall Street Journal readers saw the front-page story entitled “Investors Bullish on Fed Tips,” by Susan Pulliam.  The opening discussion was alarming. The story discusses private conversations that took place between Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Nancy Lazar, an economist with International St...