Word: feds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hope is that further rate cuts will stabilize volatile financial markets and accelerate the slowing economy. But as the rate heads toward zero, the Fed is rapidly running out of room for reductions. Not only that, economists and analysts are questioning whether rate cuts produce any bang for the buck under the current extraordinary circumstances...
...Analysts in Japan say the U.S. faces a similar situation today. The Fed's recent rate cut "is better than doing nothing, but it will unlikely work so much as it did in the past," says Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JPMorgan Securities in Tokyo. Hiromichi Shirakawa, chief economist at Credit Suisse in Tokyo, believes that the Fed may bring its rates down to zero by the middle of 2009, as the U.S. economy slows in coming quarters. "Will it be effective or stimulative? My answer is not necessarily so," he says...
...what news was there in today's announcement? Well, nobody dissented, for one thing. The five interest-rate cuts in the first half of this year all came in the face of no votes, as a hawkish minority on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) worried that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke risked setting off an inflationary spiral. Now everyone at the Fed seems to have come around to Bernanke's Great Depression-influenced view that it's a deflationary spiral that we really need to be worried about...
...Federal Reserve announced Wednesday afternoon that it was lowering its target short-term interest rate to 1%. Big deal. Almost everybody was already expecting the half-point rate cut that the Fed delivered, and the actual federal-funds rate (as opposed to the target rate) has mostly been below 1% for the past three weeks anyway. The stock market's reaction? A yawn, as the Dow closed down 74 points...
...Even Republicans who didn't vote for Webb in 2006 are looking at Democrats this year. Karen Krivo, a 41-year-old mother of two who until now never considered voting for a Democrat for any office, is fed up. The high price of gasoline has made commuting the 30 miles into Washington impossible for some, and the housing crisis has glutted the once booming market. "It's a vote against President Bush and the Republican Congress's policies," she says. "I know we need to change, and Barack Obama provides that change...