The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced this week that the electronic system it uses for storing filings from public companies was accessed by hackers. The...
In an unsurprising development, the Federal Reserve decided at this week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting that it would begin implementing the program of drawing down its balance sheet that it had begun to develop earlier this year. But while ending aggressively expansive monetary policy is a good thing, actively tightening monetary policy does bring up some cause...
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...
A group of Congressmen in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies recently held a forum to propose the monetization of the Mexican Silver Libertad one ounce silver coin. The monetization of silver in Mexico has been a favorite project of Mexican businessman Hugo Salinas Price for years, and the idea continues to enjoy support among some members of Mexico’s political class. Supporters...
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...
President Trump claimed today that rich Americans will “not be gaining at all” from his proposed tax reform plan. That runs counter to many analyses of the tax reform plans he campaigned on as a candidate, which found that the rich would in fact benefit. The devil, of course, is in the details, but this statement leads to speculation...
The national debt when Bill Clinton took office in 1993 was $4.188 trillion. By the time he left office in 2001, it was $5.727 trillion, an increase of 37 percent. As profligate as that seemed at the time, it has been overshadowed by even greater subsequent debt increases. By the time President George W. Bush left office in 2009,...
Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer unexpectedly announced his resignation last week. He will resign from the board in October, meaning that President Trump will now be able to appoint at least 4 of the 7 members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, thus making an immediate impact on monetary policy and potentially impacting monetary policy for...
Fees charged on 401(k) plans have been falling for years, but that decrease has slowed down recently. The average 401(k) plan expense ratio is now 0.41%, down from 0.52% in 2013 and 0.42% in 2016. Lower fees are important to investors for a number of reasons. The primary advantage of lower fees is that you lose less money from your...
In the aftermath of the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole conference, there has been renewed discussion of a potential currency war. Central banks responded to the financial crisis by pumping trillions of dollars worth of liquidity into the financial system. It wasn’t just the Federal Reserve that engaged in those policies of quantitative easing – the Bank of...