First, why was Janet Yellen summoned to the White House to meet with President Obama and Vice President Biden? The most ostensible reason is PROBABLY to get the Fed’s view on the economic impact of Trump and Bernie Sanders. Is the anger in the land a result of stagnant wages and is there any policy impact the White House could pursue without distorting the economy? Is fiscal stimulus a possible positive response and would the Fed be receptive without immediately raising rates? There are no certain answers to why Yellen went only conjecture. But one thing that caught my attention was the headline in today’s Financial Times: “Lew Urges IMF to Get Tough on Exchange Rate Manipulators.”
Posts Tagged ‘TLTRO’
Notes From Underground: Prelude, Nothing To Hide (In the Spirit of Stairway to Heaven)
April 12, 2016Notes From Underground: Old Friends Sat On A Park Bench Like Bookends (Simon & Garfunkel)
April 10, 2016
I’ve been staring at this image and keep thinking about the three living Fed Chairmen that sat on the stage April 7 and the fourth that was teleported from Washington, D.C. I was thinking about the replies to weak questions posed by the moderator and better questions from the audience. I thought about the question I would have asked first. I would have asked each Fed Chair what they had thought about the role of GOLD in the post-Bretton Woods global financial system. Ben Bernanke famously opined that he didn’t understand GOLD but seemed very comfortable visualizing a role for BITCOIN. Yellen has never openly stated her concern about the barbarous relic. Back in the 1960s, Alan Greenspan wrote a serious paper for the Ayn Rand society on the important role of GOLD in a global system and more important for the impact of GOLD for a democratic capitalist world.
Notes From Underground: The Emptiness of the Chattering Classes, Opining On Everything With Vacuous Thought
March 14, 2016The main political news of the weekend was the falling electoral support of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the three regional elections. The refugee issue continued to be the theme of voter discontent, according to the script presented by the nattering nabobs of nonsense. I have written that the financial repression foisted upon the German saving class was going to be a problem for Chancellor Merkel as insurance and pension funds were being punished in an effort to bail out the peripheral banks and ultimately the heavily indebted governments of the non-German core countries. Unlike the U.S., which has some political input on the role of the Federal Reserve, the German electorate is subjugated to a central bank over which it has no authority.
Notes From Underground: Mama, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up To Be Global Macro Traders
September 4, 2014Well, NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND gets an A+ for analysis and an F or incomplete for EXECUTION. Caught off guard by Draghi’s timing, the market never provided a rally for the more cautious trader. The euro currency began its break 55 minutes before the official ECB rate announcement as Reuters ran a story revealing the governing board’s discussion of a supposed EU500 BILLION ABS program. A leak during the meeting should provide reason for the ECB to investigate its security breaches and find out who is making money from revealing important information ahead of the governing officials. It must be like Congress, where elected representatives are allowed to be insider traders.
Notes From Underground: A Quick Note On Tomorrow’s Unemployment
June 5, 2014Post-ECB the U.S. employment report will be of minimal importance. The market is expecting a 210,000 increase in nonfarm payrolls (NFP), a modest rise after April’s larger than expected 288,000 increase. The unemployment rate is guesstimated to rise to 6.4% from 6.3%. More importantly, the average hourly earnings is estimated to rise 0.2% after last month’s flat number. The wage gains are now the most important piece of data as the Yellen Fed has more than hinted that stagnant wages have been a perennial drag of consumer demand. It is better for wages to rise than demand to remain tepid. If wages were to outpace inflation it would act to stimulate domestic consumption.