By the narrowest margin ever the Senate has confirmed Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve. She will be the first female Fed boss, but that’s not the news. As the New York Times put it, Yellen is “an influential proponent of the Fed’s extraordinary measures to revive the economy.” She told the Times…
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After the mortgage crisis left many homeowners in foreclosure, the federal government cut a $3.6 billion settlement with banks accused of wrongful evictions and such. But now those settlement checks are being returned for “insufficient funds.” As the New York Times noted, the government chose Rust Consulting to distribute the checks. But Rust failed…
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My colleague Jeff Hummel pointed out an interesting blog post by Ted Levy where he asks the question: what’s the point of the debt ceiling? Levy shows that since the debt ceiling was created in 1917, it has been raised over 100 times, 8 times in just the last ten years. In fact, Congress…
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Mark Spitznagel has a short op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where he illustrates the disastrous effects of central planning through monetary policy. The actions of the Federal Reserve have only allowed bad investments to persist and to postpone inevitable corrections necessary in the capital structure of the economy. Herein are pearls of great…
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The Daily Show with Jon StewartGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook As it has come to light, from August 2007 to April of 2010 the Fed loaned out over $7.7 trillion to troubled banks. A Bloomberg report reveals that the U.S. government made these secret bailouts…
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Below is an excellent Bloomberg interview with James Rickards, senior managing director of Tangent Capital Partners and author of “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis.” He talks with James Grant, publisher of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, on recent Federal Reserve monetary policy, the gold standard and the impact of Fed policy…
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First, it was Greece circling the drain. Today, it’s Italy that’s getting set to enter the national-debt death spiral. Via ZeroHedge (original source misspellings not corrected): Euphoria may have returned briefly courtesy of yet another promise for a resignation that will likely not be effectuated for weeks or months, if at all, and already…
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Shahien Nasiripour reports at The Financial Times in “Freddie Mac seeks further $6bn from taxpayers” that: Freddie Mac, the US-controlled mortgage financier, has requested an additional $6bn from US taxpayers, following a $4.4bn third-quarter loss, the company’s worst three-month performance in more than a year. The home loan group said more homeowners were falling…
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Today, The Economist is facilitating a discussion between the two sides of the stimulus debate. On one side of the spectrum is Richard C. Koo, Chief economist at Nomura Research Institute, who opens his argument with: Monetary policy is largely useless in this type of recession because those with balance sheets underwater are not interested in…
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HT: Tyler Watts