Posts Tagged ‘Hilsenrath’

Notes From Underground: If Everybody Is Talking Who Is Listening

May 20, 2014

Presented with comment:

 

The First Economist

Yesterday, the airwaves were filled with global financial speakers singing from the hymnal of disinflation. His eminence, MR. 250 GRAND, was wowing the private speakers circuit with his opinion on stock market valuations and economic growth. Mr. Bernanke, please do not follow in the footsteps of Sir Alan Greenspan, who in his post-chairman life proved that he had very little understanding of the economy he was trying control. Only in the world of access journalism do the anointed powers pretend to be all-knowing oracles. As Bernanke hits the lecture circuit and speaks freely without the Fed backdrop it puts the current Fed Chair Janet Yellen into a very difficult position.T he media is in search of a story and a hero to worship, which propagates the idea of Fed decisions being based on rocket science with Fed policy a certainty. Again, theory and practice (praxis) do not produce hard facts in the world economics. In further support of the Fed’s “uncertainty principle,” yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a Jon Hilsenrath interview with Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren. The interview is based on the operational techniques the Fed plans to utilize to “Raise Short-Term Interest Rates.”

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Notes From Underground: Tomorrow Brings More Bernanke, But First A Word From Hilsenrath

July 16, 2013

The financial world waits for Ben Bernanke’s testimony to the House Financial Services Committee. (The written speech will be made available at 7:30 a.m. CST, 90 minutes prior to the start of testimony.) This is a new policy so as to preempt any leakage by the notorious inside trading group that resides within the bowels of a non-regulated legislature. (Of course, high frequency trading groups will have it two seconds earlier. What are campaign contributions for?) The prepared text will be plain vanilla and any possible market moving news will come during the Q&A. It would be a great surprise if Chairman Bernanke reveals any new wrinkles on FED policy for another bout of veering from the FOMC minutes would begin to undermine the FED‘s credibility.

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