Category: Central Banks
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Thursday, November 18, 2010
Quantitative Easing is Sinking the Fed's Status / Politics / Central Banks
Uh oh, Mr. Bernanke, the natives are getting restless. Now it's not just Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, or foreign central bankers, but more and more American economists who are starting to openly challenge the second round of "quantitative easing."
It's tough to rule the world, and sometimes the benighted masses get uppity. The first surprising pushback came in the summer of 2009, during the healthcare "town hall" meetings, which scared many legislators back to DC. More recently, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials seemed unprepared for the outrage over invasive pat downs and body scans.
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Monday, November 15, 2010
Bernanke Clips the People's Coin - From Bakersfield to Burma / Politics / Central Banks
"Ben Bernanke: The Chauncey Gardiner of Central Banking" examined the Federal Reserve's November 3, 2010, decision to save the economy by inflating the asset markets. Chairman Bernanke shared his unpardonable rationale for QE2 in the Washington Post, on November 4, 2010. His deadly cruise missiles, QE1 and QE2, were described in "Chauncey Gardiner."
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
Dr Bernanke Gets a Phone Call From Capitalist China / Politics / Central Banks
Zhou Xiaochuan is the Governor of the People’s Bank of China. Imagine that the following phone call were to take place.
Zhou: Hello. Dr. Bernanke?
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Monday, October 18, 2010
What Can We Expect Next from the Bernanke Fed? / Interest-Rates / Central Banks
Roger Garrison writes: On October 15, Ben Bernanke spoke at the Boston Fed's conference, "Monetary Policy in a Low-Inflation Environment." His remarks were long and ponderous and consisted mostly of "Fedspeak" along with seeming excerpts from a typical intermediate-macroeconomics textbook. He rehashed the Fed's statutory mandate of maximum employment and price stability — which comes from the Keynes-inspired Full Employment Act of 1946.
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Saturday, October 16, 2010
End The FED and Get The Gold / Politics / Central Banks
How can we end the Federal Reserve System? Prior to 2008, this question would have been entirely hypothetical. It is still entirely hypothetical, because the Federal Reserve System is in charge of monetary policy; the Congress of the United States is not. Certainly, the voters of the United States are not. Nevertheless, I wish to indulge myself in a completely hypothetical speculation. I wish it were less hypothetical than it is, but things are better than they were before 2008. "All hypothetical possibilities are equal, but some are more equal than others."
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Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Central Bankers are Paid to Lie - Buy Corn / Politics / Central Banks
I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences and will be guided solely by the Federal Reserve's mandate from Congress and by the public interest." -Prospective Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, confirmation hearing, 2005
"The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth." -Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, Nightly Business Report, 1994
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Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Fed Crossing the Line? / Interest-Rates / Central Banks
William Poole writes: New York Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) president Bill Dudley’s speech Friday attracted much press attention, as it should have. His speech is correctly read, as in the press commentary, as providing a broad hint of more policy easing to come. During my tenure as president of the St. Louis Fed, I overlapped with Dudley, who, along with being president of the New York Fed, is Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). I know him to be a competent and cautious policymaker. It is hard for me to believe that he would not have cleared this speech with Chairman Bernanke before presenting.
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Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The US Does Not Own Or Control Its Money System / Politics / Central Banks
What is money?
Most of our adult lives are devoted to making this stuff. Next to food, water, and sleep it’s the #1 concern for most human beings in the US. Nearly 80% of divorced couples cite financial difficulties as a reason for the divorce. And the American Psychological Association reports that 73% of Americans cite money as a source of significant stress.
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Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The Cost of Fed Incompetence / Politics / Central Banks
I have grown old yelling at my neighbors and family members to buy gold, silver and oil, to little-to-no avail, and I can see that they are getting bored with my same old million reasons why they should, and how their deliberate inaction only proves their stupidity, which I never tire of pointing out, so they can't say that they "didn't know" that they were stupid.
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Saturday, September 25, 2010
Ron Paul's Bill to Audit the Fed, A Red-Alert Threat to the Regime / Politics / Central Banks
"Show me the money!" Cuba Gooding made this phrase famous in the 1996 movie, Jerry McGuire. The phrase soon got into the language.
"Follow the money!" That came from the movie, All the President's Men. No one knows who said it. "Deep Throat" didn't. The screenwriter says that he does not know where he got it. It has entered the language.
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Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Inflation is Not a Concern, Exploiting Bernanke / Politics / Central Banks
It is unfortunate the media does not make better use of an accessible resource: itself. Newspapers and financial TV are generally content to report what is being said today with no reference to the past. There seems to be no memory. A recent instance is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's opinion that inflation is not a concern. In a sane world, his opinion would not matter much. We live in a more nonsensical atmosphere in which abstractions substitute for reality.
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Monday, September 13, 2010
The Federal Reserve’s Next Moves … / Interest-Rates / Central Banks
We are now entering a period of time that I’ve been warning you about. A time when the majority begins to recognize that the U.S. and European economies are both plunging deep under water, drowning in debt …
While at the same time, leaders in both the U.S. and Europe face political nightmares … financial markets going haywire … gold soaring through the roof … and central banks beginning, yet again, to pull out their big guns.
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Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Federal Reserve's Digital Bullets Kept in Reserve to Fight Inflation Hedging Mentality / Economics / Central Banks
Every army keeps troops in reserve. If there is a breakthrough in the defensive line by the enemy army, the commanding general needs reserves to send into the breach to keep his army from being routed. It is too risky not to have reserves.
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Thursday, September 02, 2010
Bernanke Out of Bullets, But Not Bombs / Politics / Central Banks
Word on the street is that the Fed is now "out of bullets." Many economists fear that in its efforts to spur recovery, the Fed may have already exhausted its array of monetary ammunition and that it has nothing left of significance to fire at the steadily advancing recession. They believe that since interest rates are already near zero and Fed policies have failed to inspire banks to expand commercial and consumer lending (despite ample bank reserves), the tools traditionally employed by the Fed have been rendered impotent.
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Monday, August 30, 2010
Rumors of the China Central Bank Chief's Defection on U.S. Treasury Bond Losses / Politics / Central Banks
Rumors have circulated in China that People’s Bank of China (PBC) Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan may have left the country. The rumors appear to have started following reports on Aug. 28 which cited Ming Pao, a Hong Kong-based news agency, saying that because of an approximately $430 billion loss on U.S. Treasury bonds, the Chinese government may punish some individuals within PBC, including Zhou.
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Monday, August 30, 2010
An Unofficial Translation of Bernanke's Jackson Hole Speech, Part 2 / Politics / Central Banks
Here we get to where the rubber meets the road.
In the remainder of my remarks I will discuss the policies the Federal Reserve is currently using to support economic recovery and price stability. I will also discuss some additional policy options that we could consider, especially if the economic outlook were to deteriorate further.
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Sunday, August 29, 2010
Breaking News: Bernanke Can’t Get It Up / Politics / Central Banks
The worry that many people had this time last year (or gleeful anticipation (for those who held gold)), was that with all the QE and the bailouts, not to forget the stimulus, hyper-inflation would become ignited in USA and that would signal the final death-rattle of Evil Fiat currencies.
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Saturday, August 28, 2010
Translation of Bernanke's Jackson Hole Speech / Interest-Rates / Central Banks
It is far easier to translate Bernanke than Greenspan. Both men had this task: to deceive the public. Greenspan adopted verbal obfuscation as his technique. Bernanke has adopted boredom.
I hope this exercise will help you understand his speech of August 27.
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Friday, August 27, 2010
In Defence of Alan Greenspan: The Age of Turbulence Re-visited / Politics / Central Banks
Plenty of people have been laying into Alan Greenspan since the full horror of the financial catastrophe that threatened to destroy America (and it still might), was laid bare:
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Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Fed is Confused / Politics / Central Banks
The Federal Reserve has confused "changing nothing" for "doing nothing." The result? They are still the worst actor on Wall Street.
I was wrong.
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