As you probably know, there’s a vacancy at the Fed in the vice chair position. A frontrunner has emerged – Janet Yellen, currently at the SF Fed branch and a big fan of the ZIRPstravaganza: Appointing Yellen, 63, who was unavailable for comment Friday, would reinforce Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s policy of keeping interest [...]
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Punxatawney Phil saw his shadow, so we’re expecting six more weeks of winter. And Australia failed to hike their interest rates as expected this morning (theirs, incidentally, is at 3.75%), so we expect the US to not start hiking for quite some time. Well, we expected that anyway, but the shadow thing is proof. [Disclaimer: [...]
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As Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke rakes in a salary of $191, 300, a number which we can only hope includes performance bonuses. He heads up an agency that happens to be the largest bank in the world. It issues currency, is a bank for both the government and for giant commercial banks (acting as [...]
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We heard there was a protest outside the ECB yesterday, and we thought: is this related to interest rates? Buying bonds? Against some kind of coordinated action with the BOE? It was nothing like that – it was a 90-minute strike by staffers, who formed an anti-Trichet drum circle: European Central Bank workers staged a [...]
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Ahhh, let’s reflect on Q4 2008. It wasn’t that long ago, and interest rates on short-term T-bills were throwing up goose eggs. At the time, though, it was because investors were fleeing stocks and corporate bonds into the safest thing they could think of short of shoving money under their mattresses – in other words, [...]
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