Business

Ten years ago today, Crunchy Cons was published. I would love to hear from readers who were influenced by it, one way or another. What did it do for you? Hey, it’s still available on Kindle!

By Southbay Research

"Recent sizable declines in oil prices will likely hold down overall inflation in the near term. But as the effects of these oil price declines and other transitory factors dissipate and as resource utilization continues to rise, the Committee expects inflation to move gradually back toward its objective."

      - Janet Yellen, December 2014

The European Central Bank has shed some more light on its operations in 2015, the year wherein it decided to forget about the free market economy as the bank has become one of the main market participants now.

The Central Bank’s net income from the asset purchase program increased from 2M EUR to 161M EUR, and the asset purchase program was responsible for the 9.4%  increase in the net profit of the bank. Indeed, the ECB has made a very handsome profit of almost 1.1 billion Euro, which was distributed amongst the national central banks in the Eurosystem.

Source: ECB

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

For several years now the small coterie of Keynesian academics and apparatchiks who have seized nearly absolute financial power through the Fed’s printing presses have justified the lunacy of unending ZIRP and massive QE on the grounds that there is too little inflation. The bureaucrats at the IMF even invented a lame-brained catch-phrase, calling the purported scourge of money which retains most of its value “lowflation”.