It's widely known that the Federal Reserve has been tasked by Congress with a "dual mandate" to maintain stable consumer-goods prices, low unemployment and - oh yes - buoyant equity prices. However, as Reuters revealed on Monday, the central bank has another legally binding obligation that might upset some of its clients: Helping the US intelligence community spy on foreign governments.
Authored by Valentin Schmid via The Epoch Times,
James Rickards, author of “The Road to Ruin,” has successfully predicted Federal Reserve (Fed) policy in the past. In this interview with The Epoch Times, he explains why the recent tightening could lead to a recession and why he recommends gold as a “crisis hedge.” He also explains why he thinks bitoin is in a bubble.
http://content.jwplatform.com/players/1fjLMlxk-jpm2kCrG.html
It's set to be a busy week with a a jam-packed agenda for central bank watchers, with speeches due from Janet Yellen, Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, Haruhiko Kuroda and more. Economic data may also drive momentum in financial markets, with closely watched reports due on inflation, employment, manufacturing and housing from China to the U.S. We also have GDP, durable goods and consumer confidence in US, industrial production in Japan and confidence indexes in EA
Key highlights:
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
The Federal Reserve is now setting out on a new path for quantitative tightening (QT) after nine years of unconventional quantitative (QE) easing policy. It is the evil twin of QE which was used to ease monetary conditions when interest rates were already zero.
Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
Dear Mr. Dudley,
Your recent remarks in the wake of last week’s FOMC statement were notably unhelpful.
In particular, your excuses for further rate hikes to prevent crashing unemployment and rising inflation stunk of rotten eggs.
Crashing Unemployment
Quite frankly, crashing unemployment is a construct that’s new to popular economic discourse, and a suspect one at that.