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In the past 10 years there have been only three Fed Funds rate increases. Two of those increases have occurred since President Trump won the election on November 8th, 2016. No Fed Funds Rate increases took place between June 2006 and December 2015. CNBC reported in December 2015 that President Obama oversaw “seven years of the most accommodative monetary policy in U.S. history” (from the Fed). Finally, in December 2015 after the Fed announced its first increase in the Fed Funds rate during the Obama Presidency, it was reported that: Given the economic outlook, and recognizing the time it takes...

Some fear rate hikes could tip the economy into a recession. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday lifted benchmark interest rates for only the third time in about a decade, and that has caused trepidation among some market participants. Lance Roberts, chief investment strategist at Clarity Financial, makes the case in one chart that raising interest rates off ultralow levels during a period of tepid economic growth coincides with recessions in the following three to nine months (see chart below, which compares real, inflation-adjusted, GDP to Fed interest rate levels). The Fed lifted key rates by a quarter-point Wednesday to a...

Most Americans do not understand this, but the truth is that the Federal Reserve has far more power over the U.S. economy than anyone else does, and that includes Donald Trump. Politicians tend to get the credit or the blame for how the economy is performing, but in reality it is an unelected, unaccountable panel of central bankers that is running the show, and until something is done about the Fed our long-term economic problems will never be fixed. For an extended analysis of this point, please see this article. In this piece, I am going to explain why the...

"While it may not be the very definition of irony, we do find the fact that the Atlanta Fed has just cut its Q1 GDP forecast from 1.2% to 0.9%, a number which if confirmed would be the lowest quarterly print in year, just two hours before the Fed's rate hike quite humorous. As a reminder, the number was as high as 3.4% one and a half months ago."

For the first time this year, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, a widely expected move following strengthening economic reports and signals from Fed officials. After its two-day policy meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to raise the range of the federal funds rate to 0.75% and 1.00%, citing progress in labor market growth, business fixed investment and inflation. “In view of realized and expected labor market conditions and inflation, the Committee decided to raise…the fed funds rate,” the central bank wrote in its statement. One member of the committee, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, voted against the decision,...

U.S. stocks traded higher Wednesday, helped by a bounce in oil prices, after the Fed raised interest rates, as expected. Shorter-end Treasury yields came off session highs. The 2-year yield (U.S.:US2Y) fell to 1.33 percent after earlier hitting a high of 1.401 percent, its highest since June 11, 2009. The 10-year yield (U.S.:US10Y) traded around 2.58 percent as of 2:01 p.m.

Raphael Bostic, a former Obama administration housing official, was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, becoming the first African-American selected to lead one of the 12 regional Fed banks in the institution’s century of existence. Mr. Bostic, a 50-year-old professor of public policy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, will take over June 5, the Atlanta Fed said Monday. He succeeds Dennis Lockhart, who retired at the end of February after a decade of service, and his appointment was approved by the Atlanta Fed’s board of directors and the Fed board of governors, the...

Eight years after the crisis of 2008-09, central banks are still injecting $200 billion a month into the global financial system to keep it from imploding. If you want a central banker to choke on his croissant, read him this quote from socio-historian Immanuel Wallerstein: "Countries (have lost the ability) to control what happens to them in the ongoing life of the modern world-system." Stated another way, Wallerstein is asking: what do central banks no longer control? The quote is from Wallerstein's recent meditation on China: China is Confident: How Realistic? "The question is how realistic is this self-assessment of...

Yesterday I told you that the US government had recently released its annual financial report to the public.And the numbers are pretty gruesome.For example, the government’s “net loss” in fiscal year 2016 more than doubled, from MINUS $467 billion to MINUS $1 trillion.It’s astonishing that anyone could manage to lose so much money, let alone in a year where devoid of major wars, recessions, financial crises, or infrastructure projects.But what else can we expect from an institution that spent billions of dollars to build a website?Today I wanted to highlight a few other items from the government’s report that are...

You might remember the story of Obama’s DHS hacking the State of Georgia around the time of the 2016 Election. I was highly interested in the story, but the only explanation that was revealed by Jeh Johnson was a strange one of a “copy and paste” mistake by a lowly DHS worker. It did not make sense, so I did not report on it. However, it has just been revealed to be more of a story now; in fact, it could be a pretty big one for Obama and Jeh Johnson. Title 18 of the federal code makes it a...

Though they are officially “non-profit” organizations, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, and several other Christian organizations are profiting from lucrative contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees in the United States. Of the 100,000 refugees resettled in the United States in 2014 under the Refugee Resettlement program, an estimated 40 percent were Muslims. In FY 2015, the State Department, through the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, spent more than $1 billion on these programs, which settled international refugees “vetted” by the United Nations High Commission on International Refugees in all 50 states...

"If Hillary Clinton would have won the election, then the Fed would have continued with more moderate interest rate hikes – or none at all – as they did for President Obama. So let’s get this straight – when the Fed raises interest rates it is to worsen the U.S. economy. Why? When interest rates go up, what happens? There is less borrowing. So what do you suppose happens to the total amount of money in the U.S. economy when there is less borrowing? There is less money. And that’s how the Fed justifies it.

The ten most populous cities where local leaders shield illegal immigrants from federal law could lose $2.27 billion in federal funds, a Reuters analysis has found. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other large cities could lose federal funding for housing, education, airport improvements, HIV treatment, and more. “The [funding] numbers do not include federal money for law enforcement, which was excluded in the executive order, and programs like Medicaid, which are administered by state governments,” Reuters states.

<p>Tax "reform," starting with taxes on business, seems to be on everyone's agenda, and it may be a place where the incoming Trump administration and its Democratic critics find common ground. But it's still going to be a slog, and one reason is so-called "pass-through" businesses whose taxes are levied at personal income tax rates.</p>

NEW HAVEN – Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict. In the United States, two illusions have been important recently in financial markets. One is the carefully nurtured perception that President-elect Donald Trump is a business genius who can apply his deal-making skills to make America great again. The other is a naturally occurring illusion: the proximity of Dow 20,000. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has been above 19,000 since November, and countless news...

Donald Trump hasn’t moved into the White House yet, but the president-elect is already influencing the outlook for global economic growth. This week, the International Monetary Fund raised its US economic growth forecast by half a percent for 2017 and 2018, as a result of Trump’s planned tax cuts, infrastructure spending and regulatory reform. The IMF now expects the US economy to grow 2.3% this year and 2.5% next year. But Paul Sheard, chief economist at S&P Global, says the outlook for economic growth is largely dependent on which Donald Trump we get in the White House. Sheard believes there...

Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to join all of you at the Commonwealth Club today, not the least because the club and the Federal Reserve have a few things in common. Both organizations, as it happens, have a board of governors and a chair. And both the club's and the Fed's histories extend back more than a century. The club, as many here know, was founded in 1903, and the Federal Reserve a decade later. Perhaps because of our shared origins in the Progressive Era, a period of reform in American life, we hold certain values in common. According...

U.S. stock futures indicated a slow start for Wall Street on Monday, but the Dow industrials may have another run at 20,000, after barely missing the psychologically important level in the last session. Comments from a lineup of Federal Reserve speakers later today and the lead-in to earnings season could help provide impetus. “European equity markets have opened slightly weaker this morning after Asian markets unwound some of the gains overnight, but with Dow futures only moderately lower, there is still potential for the market to turnaround later this afternoon and have another run at the number,” said James Hughes,...

For years, alternative economic analysts have been warning that the “miraculous” rise in U.S. stock markets has been the symptom of wider central bank intervention and that this will result in dire future consequences. We have heard endless lies and rationalizations as to why this could not be so, and why the U.S. “recovery” is real. At the beginning of 2016, the former head of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve crushed all the skeptics and vindicated our position in an interview with CNBC where he stated

President-elect Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to return the US to 4% gross-domestic-product growth during his presidency. One of the best ways to achieve this appears to be his proposed $550 billion stimulus package to help rebuild infrastructure. Even if Trump can get his infrastructure plan past Democrats, deficit hawks in his own party, and regulators, there may be one more opponent preventing an economic boom: Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen... ...comments at the Fed's December meeting appear to signal a "Yellen Call" that will dampen the financial and economic impact of any large-scale infrastructure plan. The strategists...