It would be nice if the proponents of reducing the deficits and the debt could achieve those essential goals by threatening to block an increase in the debt ceiling. But they can’t. Trying to do so will not only fail, but it will hurt their worthy causes, present and future. In the first place, the [...]
We learned today that the Federal Reserves turned over $89 billion of its profits, primarily from interest on its securities portfolio, to the U.S. Treasury during 2012. The amount repatriated in recent years has grown substantially because of the sharp growth in the Fed’s total assets resulting from its purchases of Treasuries and Mortgage Backed [...]
In my previous post, I noted that the FOMC has apparently begun to think of its low interest rate policy and its quantitative easing/balance sheet expansion policy as two different things. Their latest minutes suggest sentiment by some members for slowing or ending the announced open market purchases by the end of 2013, or possibly [...]
The minutes of the December 11-12 FOMC meeting, released today, have emboldened me to come out of the closet with a monetary policy suggestion and the reasoning behind it that I’ve been reluctant to express before lest I be ridiculed as hopelessly naïve. My suggestion is that the FOMC allow interest rates to rise a [...]
If the Bush tax cuts were only “tax cuts for the rich,” as we’ve been told over and over, then what does it mean to keep them for those earning less than $200,000/$250,000? Keep what? Have you noticed how the word “millionaires” has morphed into the phrase “millionaires and billionaires”? Doesn’t anyone remember that a [...]
Well, the Fed did what I expected it to do (see previous post), but it didn’t wait until after the fiscal cliff negotiations had been completed as I had hoped it would. My fear was that the politicians would take too much comfort in the Fed’s support of the economy and lose some of the [...]
Well, it looks like our leaders have chosen not to put a fence at the top of the fiscal cliff, but to count on an ambulance at the bottom to clean up the mess. We only have three weeks to go before we find out how messy it will be. I don’t have an informed [...]
Go Johnny football! Go Aggies! Cotton Bowl Next.
146,000 net new jobs were created in November according to the establishment survey of payroll employment. However, 49,000 were taken off the totals reported for the previous two months. If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I would point out that the revisions of previous months were usually positive before the election with [...]
Motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, died last week at the age of 86. He will be missed, but he left a legacy of pithy wisdom and good advice in the form of books, tapes and videos. I used to be a sucker for motivational speakers, but Zig Ziglar was one of the few I ever met [...]