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...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...
...Still, central bankers around the world, in an effort to ward off the worst effects of a global economic slowdown, appear to be engaging in a rate race to the bottom. China on Oct. 29 cut its interest rates for the third time in six weeks, and the BOJ is expected to cut its key policy rate below the current 0.5% soon. Though rates in Japan are already almost nil, Tokyo's hand is to an extent being forced by Washington. That's because as U.S. rates fall, fewer investors are willing to hold U.S. dollar debt, which undermines...
...According to Japanese analysts, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may decide that it's best to lower rates again, to below 1%, in the coming months as the economy weakens. Even though ultra-low rates may have little immediate economic impact, they help to stabilize the financial sector as well as stock markets. Equities become more attractive when interest earned by stashing cash in the bank is lower than the inflation rate. "While the BOJ's zero-rate policy did not work as expected in terms of reviving the economy, it contributed to preventing the financial system from collapsing...
...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...