US Federal Reserve

One of the recurring themes in Obama's final State of the Union address was describing the strength of the economic recovery as witnessed by the number of job gains over the past 6 (if not exactly 7) years, clearly a purely quantitative metric. There was no discussion of the qualitative component of these job gains for one simple reason: as we have explained for years, the bulk of new labor has gone to undereducated, minimum wage (and often part-time) workers.

Back on October 17, 2014, the market was in free fall mode, when out of the blue during an interview with Bloomberg TV, one of the Fed's alleged biggest hawks hinted that the Fed could do QE4 if the rout continued. The rest, as they say was history, and the Dow soared 400 points higher to close at 16,350....

... practically exactly where the Dow Jones is right now, 14 months later.

Something has definitely changed in the market: while for the past seven years (a period largely coincident with an easy, ZIRPing or QEing Fed) every day would be greeted with numerous research pieces, all urging traders to buy the dip, and to otherwise stay invested in stocks, now all the equity firms have turned their back on the S&P, and first Goldman, then JPM, then UBS, then every other equity trader has urged clients not only not to BTFD any more, but to STFR.

Correlation or Causation?

h/t DoubleLine

Easy money by The Fed expanding their balance sheet ENABLED tight oil to be produced 'economically'...

But the signals this sent to the market became self-fulfilling (thanks to an endless Fed put) further creating record US crude production (as the oil 'gold rush' ensued), forcing a real 'deflating' world to be 'glutted' with ever-increasing output of mal-investment-driven 'expensive' oil...

It's one thing for a fringe website to mock the Fed (on a daily basis, for the past 7 years), with articles such as this one we posted just before noon today, showing that inflation expectations have once again imploded, less than a month after the Fed's rate hike was supposed to signal confidence in the economy and a renormalization in inflation: