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This Wednesday, the Bank of Canada has a decision to make.Canada's oil "dream" is dying thanks to the inexorable slide in crude prices and as the IEA made clear earlier today, the pain is set to persist for the foreseeable future as the world "drowns in oversupply.""Lower for longer" has hit the country's oil patch hard. We've spent quite a bit of time documenting the plight of Alberta, where job cuts tied to crude's slide have led directly to rising suicide rates, soaring property crime, and increased food bank usage (not to mention booming business for repo men).Adding insult...

On the 7th anniversary of entering ZIRP, and for the first time since June 29th 2006, The Federal Reserve announced today that it will try and raise interest rates: *FED RAISES INTEREST RATES 0.25 POINT IN UNANIMOUS VOTE Of course, the flowery language and dots are as dovish as possible while maintaining some semblance of credibility with regard growth expectations as The Fed unleashes a tightening cycle for the first time in over 11 years.

The Federal Reserve hiked interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade on Wednesday, signaling faith that the U.S. economy had largely overcome the wounds of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The U.S. central bank's policy-setting committee raised the range of its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to between 0.25 percent and 0.50 percent, ending a lengthy debate about whether the economy was strong enough to withstand higher borrowing costs. "With the economy performing well and expected to continue to do so, the committee judges that a modest increase in the federal funds rate...

Federal Reserve officials are likely to raise their benchmark short-term interest rate from near zero Wednesday, expecting to slowly ratchet it higher to above 3% in three years. But that's if all goes as planned. Their big worry is they'll end up right back at zero. Any number of factors could force the Fed to reverse course and cut rates all over again: a shock to the U.S. economy from abroad, persistently low inflation, some new financial bubble bursting and slamming the economy, or lost momentum in a business cycle which, at 78 months, is already longer than 29 of...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen made an interesting comment yesterday on today’s jobs report, suggesting the economy just needs to add around 100K jobs a month to be okay. Via Reuters: “To simply provide jobs for those who are newly entering the labor force probably requires under 100,000 jobs per month,” with anything above that helping “absorb” those who are unemployed, discouraged or had dropped out of the labor market, Yellen, who was speaking before Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, said in a question and answer session. That 100K number is much, much lower than the current 200K monthly average...

OWNING your own house is as much the Australian dream as the American dream, and it's one that feels increasingly out of reach for many. But when one user on Quora pondered whether it was ultimately better to rent or own your own home, blogger and investor James Altucher penned this highly controversial response: I am sick of me writing about this. Do you ever get sick of yourself? I am sick of me. But every day I see more propaganda about the American Dream of owning the home. I see codewords a $15 trillion dollar industry uses to hypnotise...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday pointed to a possible December interest rate "liftoff" but said rates would rise only slowly from then on to nurture the U.S. economic recovery. [...] Her remarks pushed bond yields higher and stocks lower. They also caused investors to reset their expectations of a December rate hike above 60 percent, a sign that markets are finally taking the Fed's language seriously after a period in which U.S. central bankers were frustrated by the gap between their own outlook and market bets about their likely course of action. ...

As the market now diligently calculates the suddenly surging odds of a December rate hike, here's Yellen with a preview of what will happen once the rate hike cycle is aborted... YELLEN SAYS IF OUTLOOK WORSENED FED MIGHT WEIGH NEGATIVE RATESYELLEN SAYS NEGATIVE RATES COULD HELP ENCOURAGE BANKS TO LEND ... just as it was aborted in Japan in August of 2000 when the BOJ also decided to send a signal how much stronger the economy is by hiking 25 bps, only to cut 7 months later and to proceed to monetize not only all net Japanese debt issuance...

Jim EdwardsOctober 28, 2015 Sweden is shaping up to be the first country to plunge its citizens into a fascinating — and terrifying — economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society. The Swedish central bank held its benchmark interest rate at -0.35% today, the level it has been at since July. Although retail banks have yet to pass on that negative to rate to Swedish consumers, the longer it's held there the more financial pressure there is for banks to pass the costs onto their customers. That's a problem because Sweden is the closest country on the planet...

The concept of earning interest on money in the bank is so deeply ingrained into economic life that few people even know that the opposite can happen too: Banks can take a percentage of cash from your account in the form of negative interest rates, under certain conditions. Normally, this doesn't happen. Banks want your cash, and pay you interest on it, because the more deposits they have, the more they can lend it to others who pay them even more on their investments. But interest rates in Europe are so close to zero — and economic activity is so...

SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. economy is nearing full employment, setting the stage to ease some of the stimulus from low interest rates that's been the foundation of the nation's monetary policy, a key member of the Federal Reserve told a gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday. "Looking forward, I expect we will reach our maximum employment mandate in the near future and inflation will gradually move back to our 2 percent goal," John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said to the Urban Land Institute conference. That could potentially point to a change in the...

While the decision to delay was nearly unanimous – there was one dissenter – nearly the same amount of FOMC members said they also believe rates will move higher before the end of the year. That sentiment may have changed given the release of Friday’s much-worse-than-expected jobs report, but the minutes should provide some additional insight into why the Fed held off on a rate hike and when they might actually pull the trigger. The minutes will be released Thursday at 2 p.m. Also scheduled for release next week are: the ISM Non-manufacturing index on Monday; a report on international...

“Let me assure you, if the revenue environment weakens or interest-rate structures don’t move up, and the economy slows down, we’ll have to take out more costs,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said on Thursday at the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference. And that would mean more job cuts.BofA is famous for whittling down its headcount in recent years. In Moynihan’s 25-slide presentation, there was this chart that shows just how skillfully he has trimmed down his workforce, chopping it by 25% overall since the second quarter of 2011:Wolf Street So if, as he said, “interest-rate structures don’t move...

WASHINGTON: The US Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged on Thursday in a nod to concerns about a weak world economy, but left open the possibility of a modest policy tightening later this year. In what amounted to a tactical retreat, the US central bank said an array of global risks and other factors had convinced it to delay what would have been the first rate hike in nearly a decade. "Recent global economic and financial developments may restrain economic activity somewhat and are likely to put further downward pressure on inflation in the near term," the Fed said in...

Fed decision day: The event traders across the globe have anticipated for months has finally arrived. As of 8:00 a.m. ET, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were 43 points lower, or 0.26% to 16621. S&P 500 futures shed 6 points, or 0.31% to 1982, while Nasdaq 100 futures slid 10 points, or 0.24% to 4370. Today’s Markets Months of speculation about whether September was the month in which the Federal Reserve would begin to lift short-term interest rates is finally coming to a close. The Federal Open Market Committee meets for the final day of its two-day policy-setting meeting, which...

U.S. equity markets were lower Monday morning as traders anxiously awaited this week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting. As of 9:50 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 81 points, or 0.50% to 16350. The S&P 500 shed 8 points, or 0.45% to 1952, while the Nasdaq Composite declined 16 points, or 0.33% to 4806. Today’s Markets Wall Street waited with bated breath for the outcome of the Federal Reserve’s two-day, policy-setting meeting this week, which begins Wednesday and ends with a statement on monetary policy the day after. In recent weeks, forecasts for a September rate hike have...

Despite the stock market’s return to triple-digit gains on Tuesday in apparent response to signs that China will take steps to stimulate its economy, bankers worldwide are warning a decision by the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates next week could precipitate a stock-market collapse. Deutsche Bank, the European Union’s biggest bank, has grabbed attention by issuing a warning to the Federal Reserve that a rise in U.S. interest rates now would constitute nothing less than a “premeditated controlled demolition” that could cause global stock markets to collapse a dramatic 40 percent. The Federal Reserve is scheduled to decide...

After a tumultuous week on the world’s stock markets, investors will be focused on Wall Street Monday ahead of another set of economic reports likely to steer the Federal Reserve’s decision on whether to raise interest rates for the first time in almost a decade. The markets open Monday as investors digest news that the Fed is still actively considering a September rate hike. In a speech on Saturday, Stanley Fischer, the vice-chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors, suggested inflationary pressures could soon lead to an increase. His comments are likely to add to the volatility of already skittish...

On Wednesday we witnessed the third largest single day point gain for the Dow Jones Industrial Average ever. That sounds like great news until you realize that the two largest were in October 2008 – right in the middle of the last financial crisis. This is a perfect example of what I wrote about yesterday. Every time the market crashes, there are huge up days, huge down days and giant waves of market momentum. Even though the Dow was up 619 points on Wednesday, overall we are still down more than 2,000 points from the peak of the market....

Oh yes, remember the banks cleaned up their balance sheets and closed all those pesky derivative trades.... Right? "NEW YORK – This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished." “We saw strange things in the data,” said Chris Barnes, a former swaps trader now with ClarusFT, a London-based data firm." Except.... they didn't vanish. They went overseas, but are still there. Just remember, it was CDS and IR products that blew up the world last time, and you...