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The Federal Reserve left its benchmark interest rate unchanged today and lowered its economic forecasts after a turbulent start to the year in financial markets and lackluster U.S. growth persuaded the central bank to reassess the timing and magnitude of its plan to raise rates. The Fed maintained its target for interest rates at a range of 0.25 to 0.50 percent to give the U.S. recovery more time to get on a stable track without making recovery more difficult for the rest of the world, where growth is flagging. Only one member of the Federal Reserve's open market committee dissented...

Germany's financial regulator has said it won't take further action against the country's largest bank over alleged interest rate rigging and precious metals price fixing. The moves takes the spotlight off a former boss. The watchdog, known as Bafin, announced on Thursday it had ended several major special audits against Deutsche Bank. [...] Deutsche Bank paid $2.5 billion (2.26 billion euros) in fines in April last year after investigations on manipulating interest rates. The bank was also probed for its role in rigging prices of gold, silver, platinum and palladium. It also recorded a multibillion-euro loss for 2015. Bafin officials...

Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen faced what may have seemed like an absurd line of questioning on Capitol Hill this week: Has the Fed considered negative interest rates? It's not a fantasy. At central banks around the world, negative benchmark interest rates have become the new normal, leading to some unusual paradoxes. In Denmark, instead of paying interest on their mortgages, many borrowers have been receiving payments from banks on their home loans. On the flip side, some Swiss bank customers have had to pay banks to keep cash in savings accounts. Yellen told Congress Thursday, following negative moves by central banks in Europe and elsewhere, the Fed has...

The Federal Reserve started raising official interest rates in December. But in the stress tests that large U.S. banks have to undergo, the central bank is hypothesizing that short-term Treasury yields could drop below zero. The European Central Bank and, since Friday, the Bank of Japan are trying it with policy benchmarks. Though negative U.S. interest rates are for now only in the Fed's worst-case scenario, they are becoming a plausible downturn assumption.

The Bank of Japan is stepping up its efforts to kick-start the country's struggling economy by taking interest rates into negative territory. The central bank announced Friday that it will introduce an interest rate of minus 0.1% and will go even lower if needed. In theory, negative rates encourage consumers to save less and spend more. They can also weaken a country's currency, helping exporters. ...

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...