US Federal Reserve

From Gary Evans of Global Macro Monitor

Politico out with a piece tonight citing souces that National Economic Council Director and Goldman alum, Gary Cohn, is the leading contender to replace Janet Yellen next January. Interesting timing as it comes on the eve of Janet Yellen’s two-day semi-annual testimony before Congress.

We have heard rumors, but our priors were that Trump would pick a more rules-based chairmain, such as John Taylor of Stanford. Kind of surprising, but most presidents prefer easy money policies.

Authored by David Stockman via The Daily Reckoning,

The overwhelming source of what ails America economically is found in the Eccles Building. During the past three decades the Federal Reserve has fostered destructive financial mutations on Wall Street and Main Street.

Bubble Finance policies have fueled an egregious financial engineering by the C-suites of corporate America. This bubble has skyrocketed to the tune of $15 trillion of stock buybacks, debt-fueled mergers deals and buyouts of the last decade.

Authored by Richard Rosso via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

“The emergence of money manager capitalism means that the financing of the capital development of the economy has taken a back seat to the quest for short-run total returns.” – Circa 1992.

Wall Street has forgotten the great financial crisis.

After building out Merrill's mortgage trading floor basically from scratch, then moving to the buyside at Pimco, several weeks ago Harley Bassman, more familiar to many traders as the "Convexity Maven" - a legend in the realm of derivatives (he helped design the MOVE Index, better known as the VIX for government bonds) - decided to retire (roughly one year after his shocking suggestion that the Fed should devalue the dollar by buying gold).

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently predicted that, thanks to the regulations implemented after the 2008 market meltdown, America would not experience another economic crisis “in our lifetimes.” Yellen’s statement should send shivers down our spines, as there are few more reliable signals of an impending recession, or worse, than when so-called "experts" proclaim that we are in an era of unending prosperity.