Business

In December, Janet Yellen hiked right into what might as well be a recession in what Marc Faber suggests will go down as one the most ill-timed policy maneuvers in the history of central banking.

Things didn’t fall apart immediately, but the situation started to deteriorate markedly at the beginning of last month when collapsing crude prices and a bungled attempt to implement a circuit breaker in China triggered harrowing bouts of volatility across markets and set investors up for one of the most inauspicious starts to a year in history.

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,