Business

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”.

Via FinancialSense.com,

Bert Dohmen, founder of Dohmen Capital Research, is uber-bearish and believes that it is time for investors to panic (before everyone else does) given a potential collapse of the stock market greater than what we saw in 2008.

Here's what he had to say on Thursday's podcast:

"Over a year ago we said that we are now in a transition year from a bull market to a bear market and from a growing economy to a recession—and this could be a very deep recession...

 

After The Cleveland Fed's warning of "significant stress" in the financial markets, we find none other than Dovish-hawk Jim Bullard's St.Louis Fed growing increasingly fearful of the "r" word.

The last two times, financial stress was this "significant," The Fed unleashed QE1 and Operation Twist...

And now, as Mises Institute's Mark Thornton notes, this little known chart (below) is the St. Louis Fed's attempt to anticipate a recession in the US economy.