US Federal Reserve

Submitted by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

One can understand the Fed's frustration over the failure of its interest rate policy, and its desire to escape the zero bound.

Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

In my last article, I outlined the deliberately engineered trend toward the forced “harmonization” of national economies and monetary policies, as well as the ultimate end goal of globalists: a single world currency system controlled by the International Monetary Fund and, by extension, global governance, which internationalists sometimes refer to in their more honest public moments as the “new world order.”

At the peak of the craziness of the last cycle, banks took to protecting themselves by buying (credit) protection on other banks as a 'hedge' for systemic risk (which instead exacerbated contagion concerns, seemingly missing the facts that their bids drove risk wider, increaing counterparty risks, and that the inevitable collapse required to trigger these trades would also mean the payoffs to the 'hedges' would never be realized).

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

If the American Dream depends on skyrocketing debt built on a weakening foundation of stagnant productivity and income, then it is indeed over.

While we await the government's retail sales data on December 11, the last official economic report the Fed will see before its December 16 FOMC decision, Bank of America has been kind enough to provide its own full-month credit card spending data.