Word: fed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just how high they rise was made clearer than ever last week. In a study conducted at Boston's Tufts University, researchers fed subjects randomly selected diets that included soybean oil, semiliquid margarine, soft margarine, shortening and stick margarine, and then compared their blood fats to levels measured in high-butter diets. The more trans-fatty acids in a spread, scientists found, the more fats in the blood. Although all the butter substitutes reduced the level of LDL (the "bad" cholesterol), the trans-fatty acids sometimes drove down the concentration of HDL ("good" cholesterol), changing the critical ratio of total...
Take a deep breath, everybody -? the stock market may be about to blow its own bubble. Everybody knows that Fed chairman Allan Greenspan is going to raise interest rates by one quarter point, most likely on Wednesday. And everyone?s reasonably sure that the markets, which have been stewing about this for weeks, will take off on the news like a bull outta hell, especially when they read the Fed?s post-meeting comments Wednesday and find no hint of further action. But do they know this rally could be its own worst enemy? "My guess is that the Fed...
Moved PermanentlyMoved PermanentlyFortune Investor DataHere?s the daisy chain: Fed hikes rates. Markets, relieved, take off. Consumers, watching their portfolios swell, continue to spend like drunken sailors. Fed gets nervous, and Greenspan -? if he deems that an economic overheat is imminent -? goes into rate-hike mode all over again, confronting the markets with their worst fear and sending Street walkers back to cowering under their desks. Bye-bye rally. Of course, if investors and traders see all this coming and sell on the news, they may have to make room under that desk for Uncle Alan -? a harmless rate hike...
...hasn't the Fed officially warned that it has a "bias" toward making money and credit tighter? Yes, allows the board, but the Fed may already have accomplished as much tightening as necessary--or maybe more--by subtle measures. True, it may kick up the "Fed funds" (very short-term) interest rate it controls by a modest quarter percentage point at its rate-setting meeting at the end of June--"just to prove it can do it, for practice," in Farrell's words. But such a move has been so widely expected, and discounted, that board members think...
...even as high as they are now, says Charles Clough, chief investment strategist of Merrill Lynch, is "the bond market's proclivity to identify growth with inflation." But that proclivity, in the board's opinion, is simply wrong: there is no inflation threat scary enough to push the Fed into drastic action. Prices did spike abruptly in April, but that, says Clough, was due largely to a speculative rise in industrial commodity prices that "has already lapsed." Though Asian countries are starting to recover from the crisis that knocked demand and commodity prices so far down in 1998, recovery...