Fed’s Rules Let Brokers Turn Junk Into Cash at Height of Financial Crisis

At the height of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve allowed the world’s largest banks to turn more than $118 billion in junk bonds, defaulted debt, securities of unknown ratings and stocks into cash. Collateral of those asset types made up 72 percent of the total $164.3 billion in market-rate securities pledged to the Fed [...]

Rep. Paul Planning Hearing on Fed Foreign Lending

Persistent Federal Reserve critic Representative Ron Paul plans to hold a hearing on the U.S. central bank’s emergency loans to the branches of non-U.S. banks, his spokeswoman said on Saturday. “I was surprised and deeply disturbed … to learn the staggering amount of money that went to foreign banks,” Paul said in a statement. Read [...]

China Lashes Fed Easing as Risk to Global Recovery

China said on Thursday that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s move to ease monetary policy risked undermining the global economic recovery, adding that Washington “should not force others to take medicine for its own disease”. A senior Chinese central bank official told reporters at the G20 summit in Seoul that the Fed’s move had caused “strong [...]

The Rest of the World Goes West When America Prints More Money

Last Wednesday was a hinge point in history. The United States decided to drop all pretence of being interested in leading – or even being part of – a coordinated global policy response to the most serious economic crisis in more than 70 years. America is now isolated and the rest of the world is [...]

FOMC Announcement: $600 Billion

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow. Household spending is increasing gradually, but remains constrained by high unemployment, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Business spending on equipment and software is rising, though less [...]

The Fed at Jekyll Island

Well isn’t this cute? Just days after the Federal Reserve will announce it has launched QE2, the Fed will hold a major conference at  Jekyll Island, celebrating the secret meeting held 100 years ago that resulted in the creation of the Fed. The island is off the coast of the U.S. state of Georgia. In [...]

US Federal Reserve’s Latest Bubble Threatens Mayhem

Yet it’s not just prospects for a Japanese-style lost decade that are driving bond yields towards record lows. Anticipation of further QE – whereby central banks flood the economy with cash by buying up government debt – is creating a self-feeding spiral of ever-falling rates. This is an accident waiting to happen. Yet policymakers seem [...]

How the US Central Bank is Propping Up Europe’s Dodgiest Economies

It’s all about America this week. The world’s markets will be on tenterhooks until Wednesday’s over. By then, we should have a good idea of the results of the mid-term elections. More importantly, the Federal Reserve will have revealed how much more money it plans to print. The Fed’s money printing has annoyed leaders of [...]

Federal Reserve Bank’s Kansas City President Warns Against Low Rates

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City said Monday that keeping interest rates too low for too long would not be in the best long-term interest of the economy. Thomas Hoenig, who’s been the bank’s president for 20 years, has been a critic of the Federal Reserve maintaining interest rates at record [...]

Fed’s Bizarre Tactics Target Weaker Dollar

Is the Federal Reserve (Fed) experiencing a midlife crisis? Ever since Fed Chairman Bernanke gave a speech in Jackson Hole, Fed behavior can be summarized as, well, bizarre. According to Bernanke, the market’s inflation expectations may be too low. He considers three possible remedies: * Conducting additional purchases of longer-term securities (quantitative easing); * Modifying [...]

Bernanke: The United States is on the Brink of Financial Disaster

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered a speech  before the the Annual Meeting of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council in Providence, Rhode Island. In the speech, he warned about the current state of the government finances. His conclusion, the situation is dire and “unsustainable”. It is remarkable that mainstream media has given this [...]

Obama and Federal Reserve Courting Disaster

Few among us have any real experience with the hyperinflation that ravaged post-WWI Weimar Republic. It’s history to us, and rather abstract. Harvard law professor Friedrich Kessler did experience it, and said this is a 1993 interview: “It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. You cannot imagine the rapidity with [...]

Is Bernanke Hiding A Smoking Gun?

A Republican senator said Tuesday that documents showing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke covered up the fact that his staff recommended he not bailout AIG are being kept from the public. And a House Republican charged that a whistleblower had alerted Congress to specific documents provide “troubling details” of Bernanke’s role in the AIG [...]

Fed Made Taxpayers Junk-Bond Buyers

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner told senators on April 3, 2008, that the tens of billions of dollars in “assets” the government agreed to purchase in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos. were “investment-grade.” They didn’t share everything the Fed knew about the money. The so-called assets [...]

Time to Shut Down the Federal Reserve?

Like a mad aunt, the Fed is slowly losing its marbles. Kartik Athreya, senior economist for the Richmond Fed, has written a paper condemning economic bloggers as chronically stupid and a threat to public order. Matters of economic policy should be reserved to a priesthood with the correct post-doctoral credentials, which would of course have [...]

The Fed Bashes Bloggers

Some Fed economist (with a hard-earned Ph.D mind you) named Kartik Athreya (who lasted at Citigroup as an associate Vice President for a whopping 7 months before getting sacked in 1998 only to find solace for his expiring unemployment benefits in the public sector) has written the most idiotic “research” piece to come out of [...]

Fed’s Warsh Wary of Further Asset Purchases

The Federal Reserve should be wary of the short-term allure of further asset purchases, said Fed governor Kevin Warsh on Monday. In a speech in Atlanta, Warsh set a high bar for his support of further asset purchases, saying he would need to be convinced the benefits of the purchases would outweigh the costs of [...]

Bernanke Defends Fed’s Ability to Supervise Banks (New York Times)

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke , urged senators on Thursday not to strip the central bank of its authority to supervise the country’s largest banks, warning that to do so would pose a “grave risk,” The New York Times’s Sewell Chan reports from Washington. Read more….

Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Update: Week Of February 25 – Just $45 Billion Left In Quantitative Easing

The Federal Reserve’s assets were at $2.27 trillion as of February 25, jumping by $6 billion sequentially.  Securities held outright: $1,975 billion (an increase of $62.6 billion MoM, resulting from $59 billion increase in MBS and $3 billion in Agency Debt), or $8 billion increase sequentially.  The fed has completed $169.1 billion of $175 billion [...]

More Evidence that the Fed Sent Money to Iraq

Yesterday, I quoted an economist with the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee for eleven years who assisted with oversight of the Federal Reserve to show that there might be some basis for Ron Paul’s questions to Ben Bernanke about the Federal Reserve’s alleged shipment of money to Iraq. Here is some more information. [...]

Next Page »