US Federal Reserve

Submitted by Bill Bonner via Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man.com's Pater Tenebrarum),

False Premise

The Fed did as expected. It announced it would raise its key rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 0.5% and gradually raise it up over the next three years.

Reports the Financial Times: “Historic gamble for Yellen, as Fed makes quarter-point rise.” If all goes well, we’ll be back to “normal” in 2019 – 10 years after the long emergency began!

Authored by Mark St.Cyr,

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

US stocks soared while the Fed was meeting to raise interest rates this week - though it’s not clear why that should be so since monetary tightening isn’t generally a good thing for stock prices.

In any event, it didn’t last. Over the past 48 hours the Dow is down more than 3%, with many, many individual stocks down far more.

While most sellside "research" has traditionally been complete garbage, either meant to boost soft dollar revenues and build client goodwill by giving one-on-one "expert network" meetings with management, or a macro echo chamber of equity strategists all of whom are terrified to stray from the penguin, or is it lemming, flock (its only utility is to give insight into whatever the prevailing groupthink consensus is, allowing an easy opportunity to fade it) and desperate to be as optimistic as possible (there is little upside on Wall Street to be a pessimist or a realist) there are the occasi

Not only did the Fed miss its window of opportunity to hike rates, but it did so at the worst possible time, launching the first tightening cycle in 11 years just as US manufacturing entered its first recession since the financial crisis, just as the credit cycle entered its slowdown phase, and just as the default cycle is picking up, first in the energy sector one year ago and now spreading to all other industries.