In a recent interview with Fox Business, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned about trying to stimulate economic growth. While growth in economic productivity continues to remain limited, the Trump Administration has adopted a 3% annual GDP growth target as one of its aims. Greenspan believes that the government should be cautious in targeting a rate that high. The...
The personal savings rate in September reached its lowest level since 2007. And while it hasn’t reached its all-time low, the trend is definitely downwards. Personal savings are now at 3.1 percent of income, still slightly higher than the 2.5 percent low reached in December of 2007. Looking back at historical savings data since 1960, the savings rate had normally...
Online retail giant Amazon announced a nationwide search for its second headquarters, looking to complement its existing headquarters in Seattle. The company is looking to locate its second headquarters in a metropolitan area with more than 1 million people, with close proximity to an international flight hub, good public transit, and the ability to attract a talented and educated...
Stock markets continued to reach record levels on Friday as investor sentiment was buoyed by reports that tax reform proposals had passed their first hurdle in the Senate. Investors also were cheered by reports that President Trump is leaning towards picking Federal Reserve Board Governor Jerome Powell as the next Chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors. Markets undoubtedly...
Thirty years ago today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its largest single-day drop in history, losing 508 points, nearly 23% of its value. With the Dow currently hitting new records and standing at over 23,000 points, are we poised for a repeat of Black Monday? It seems as though stock market growth won’t ever end. It was only in...
The safety of global systemically important banks (GSIBs) has improved significantly since the Great Recession, according to the latest Global Financial Stability Report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued earlier this week. However, roughly a third of them, representing about $17 trillion in asset size, could “struggle to achieve sustainable profitability, underscoring ongoing challenges and medium-term vulnerabilities.” The IMF’s...
Most Americans with an opinion on the subject think the free market should set interest rates, not the US Federal Reserve, according to a recent survey from the Cato Institute. “Unsurprisingly, a plurality (44 percent) of Americans have not thought much about whether Federal Reserve officials or the free-market system should primarily determine interest rates,” the report stated. “However,...
Stephen Williamson, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, joined critics of the US central bank last week by conceding there is no proof that massive intervention in the credit markets such as the Fed’s quantitative easing program has worked. “There appears to be no evidence that QE works either to increase inflation, if we look at...
The Chinese government just recently announced plans to issue $2 billion in dollar-denominated debt, its first dollar-denominated debt issuance since 2004. With countries such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela turning to the yuan both for political reasons as well as for oil sales, and with the yuan’s recent inclusion in the IMF’s basket of currencies that make up Special...
After the massive Equifax data breach, you might want to take proactive measures to check your credit history and prevent your identity from being stolen. Equifax’s measures to protect consumers in the aftermath of the breach have rightly been criticized, from setting up a site that asked for even more sensitive personal information, to sending consumers to an erroneous...