Starting with the April 2021 release, virtually every monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) report has indicated some form of abnormally high inflation. For instance, the April CPI rose 4.2 percent over the previous 12 months, the largest year-to-year increase since the period ending September 2008. Similarly, the…
This year’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which meets for the first time this week, faces many unknowns, including new faces at the Fed. In fact, by year’s end, the Fed’s rate-setting body will have, at most, only two continuity voters — that is, members who voted…
The Cat's Out of the Bag In September, when current Fed chair Janet Yellen held a press conference announcing details of the Fed's normalization plan, yours truly insisted that that plan reflected the Fed's "determination to maintain its current, bureaucratically advantageous operating system," in which monetary policy…
The president just announced his pick to chair the Federal Reserve System. Subject to Senate confirmation, current Fed governor Jerome “Jay” Powell will succeed Janet Yellen as Fed chair in February 2018. Market reaction to this announcement has been sanguine, with commentators describing Powell as the "continuity candidate."…
On election night, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told MSNBC interviewer Chris Matthews that Donald Trump’s victory, after a campaign against the elites and insiders, was like Andrew Jackson’s first presidential victory. At the end of his first term in office, Jackson cut the federal government’s…