Business

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Centrally issued money optimizes inequality, monopoly, cronyism, stagnation and systemic instability.

Everyone who wants to reduce wealth and income inequality with more regulations and taxes is missing the key dynamic: central banks' monopoly on creating and issuing money widens wealth inequality, as those with access to newly issued money can always outbid the rest of us to buy the engines of wealth creation.

Confused by Yellen's direction? You're not alone.

It's not just a state of mind, that's the name of the latest slideshow by the economics team at ING bank...

While the old saying is "they don't ring a bell at the top," we suspect Fed vice-chair Stanley Fischer just came as close as one can without screaming "sell."

It's getting clearer that Fed officials are getting concerned about where asset markets are going.

Two days after Dan Loeb announced he had acquired a $3.5 billion position in the world's biggest food company, Nestle, making him the 6th largest holder, and going activist with a list of demands including 1) Improving Productivity; 2) Returning Capital to Shareholders; 3) Re-shaping the Portfolio; and, 4) Monetizing its L’Oréal Stake, moments ago the company responded by effectively conceding on day 2 of the activist campaign, announcing a plan to buyback CHF20 billion in shares by the end of June 2020, and added that in the future "capital spending will be focused particu

Over the last two months, the Fed has tried to continue to communicate
that they plan on raising rates up to at least 3% and reduce their balance
sheet by trillions.  They just raised the
Fed Funds rate by 25 bps to 1.25%. However, long term rates rallied by 50 bps!   And the
short end of the interest rate curve is priced with yields on top of the Fed
Funds rate.  This implies that either the
Fed is lying and does not plan to raise rates again (or even lower rates), or
something is broken in the bond market.