The Federal Reserve Board has issued an addendum to its “Policy Normalization Principles and Plans” for reducing its bulked up $4.5 trillion portfolio, but there’s nothing normal about unloading $4.5…
Rates Rising, Yet Bond Buying Sets Record
Rising interest rates, higher inflation and tighter monetary policy should be bad news for bonds. Yet investors have been buying record volumes of new bonds. Highly rated U.S. companies issued…
Bet You Can’t Count to a Quadrillion
When someone uses “quadrillion” in a headline, you know you’re in for a bit of an alarmist rant. We’re talking 1,000,000,000,000,000, which, stated another way, is a thousand million million. …
The Markets Need Psychotherapy
“The whole idea that the stock market reflects fundamentals is, I think, wrong. It really reflects psychology. The aggregate stock market reflects psychology more than fundamentals.” Robert Shiller, Nobel Prize-winning…
The QE Apocalypse
The end is near. The Federal Reserve Board has now put a date on the quantitative easing apocalypse, letting us know that bond buying will end in October – unless…
Prozac Nation
It’s all stress-free bliss these days … at least for anyone who’s not paying attention. Has someone been putting anti-depressants in the water supply? That’s one way to explain Wednesday’s…
The Market’s Missing Mojo
Easy money policy has its share of side effects. The stock market continues to hit new highs, thanks to the Fed, but the level of risk that investors and taxpayers…
Polar Vortex or Recession Redux?
The recovery that wasn’t a recovery may have come to an end, as the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that gross domestic product dropped by 1% during the first quarter…
The Fed Goes Long
Few investors today would consider investing in long-term Treasury bonds. The yield curve, which measures the spread between interest rates for short-term and long-term bonds, is not as flat as…
Think Like a Rat
Experiments show that if you put rats in a maze and give them a jolt of electricity when they go the wrong way, they will eventually go the right way.…