Word: feds
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...when he accidentally killed a duck. The duck was going to die anyway, but not until it had been properly fattened up in the breeding factory where Long, then 12, was required to work in the waning days of China's Cultural Revolution. The ducks were force-fed through a tube operated by a foot-pedal - a single pump per meal. One day Long got careless and accidentally pumped twice. End of duck...
With the economy in the U.S. "contracting significantly" in the fourth quarter, as San Francisco Fed president Janet Yellen recently put it, an issue that was practically unthinkable three months ago is now, for the Fed, front and center: the possibility of the U.S. entering a phase of deflation, or protracted declines in the general price level. In its statement accompanying the most recent interest-rate cut, the Fed said, "In light of the declines in the prices of energy and other commodities and weaker prospects for economic activity, [the Fed] expects inflation to moderate...
That's the optimistic view - and, for now, the dominant view of the Fed, most economists believe. But lurking not far from the surface of economic policymakers' deliberations these days is the dreaded d word: deflation. "Sure, we're very cognizant of it," one source familiar with Fed's thinking on the matter told TIME this week. "We don't think we're there yet, but we're very aware of the possibility." So is Wall Street. At Merrill Lynch, chief investment strategist Richard Bernstein issued a report within hours of Barack Obama's election, listing three developments for investors...
...Some economists - for now a minority, to be sure - believe the U.S. is at serious risk of a deflationary spiral, even if just a quarter ago, inflation was above the Fed's comfort zone of 2% to 3%. "Compared to Japan's problem a decade ago, this crisis is unfolding much faster and spreading wider due to financial globalization," says Shanghai-based independent economist Andy Xie. A financial system unable or unwilling to lend, a tapped out U.S. consumer, and business now retrenching - and laying people off - all are a formula for possible deflation. What's so wrong with declining...
...yeah, I think we might have been able to fight our way through it. I was just looking at the popular vote. It's 53% to 46%. We were probably three or four points on top of him before Lehman Brothers went down. You had a country that was fed up with the Bush Administration, horrible wrong-track numbers, and an opponent with $700 million. We had $85 [million]. And we got 56 million votes. That's not too bad in this environment. All the really, really red states that everybody thought we might lose-except for Indiana, I guess...