Tag: george yacik

Needed: More Transparency at the Fed

Posted on by George Yacik

George Yacik - INO.com Contributor - Fed & Interest Rates


The Federal Reserve is starting to feel some heat from both the right and the left about how secret its activities deserve to be from American taxpayers. The fact that next year is a presidential election year and the heat is being brought by two candidates for the Oval Office may mean that the pressure may amount to something this time.

On January 28 Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, reintroduced his "Audit the Fed" bill that would subject the Fed's monetary policy discussions and decisions to audits by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

"This secretive government-run bureaucracy promotes policies that have impacted the lives of all Americans," Paul said. "Citizens have the right to know why the Fed's policies have resulted in a stagnant economy and record numbers of people dropping out of the workforce."

Previous versions of Paul's bill – originally sponsored by his father, former presidential hopeful Ron Paul, and others – have gotten nowhere, largely because Democrats controlled the Senate. Now, of course, that body is now controlled by the Republicans. Paul got 30 co-sponsors to his bill. Continue reading "Needed: More Transparency at the Fed" →

Get me to the Greek

Posted on by George Yacik

George Yacik - INO.com Contributor - Fed & Interest Rates


OK, so it’s not the most original headline. But it reveals the thinking of some savvy investors, and I think they have a good point.

Baron Rothschild, the 18th century British nobleman and member of the Rothschild banking family, is credited with saying, “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”

I haven’t heard that there is actual blood running in the streets of Athens or other Greek cities, but it’s pretty close, financially speaking, which means it may be time to be buying Greek bonds.

We all know by now that after taking the most seats in the January 25 parliamentary election, the left-wing Syriza party formed a coalition government with the small right-wing Greek Independence Party. The one thing the two have in common is opposition to anti-austerity measures imposed on Greece by the European Central Bank and European Union as conditions for earlier financial bailouts and more in the future. There is also the fear that the Syriza-led government wants to secede from the EU, although that seems unlikely to happen.

Not surprisingly, investors have fled from Greek assets in droves and pulled their money out of Greek banks.
The Athens Stock Exchange General Index, or ASE, has tanked more than 40% since last March, nearly 13% since the election. Government bond prices have likewise plummeted, sending yields soaring. The yield on the 10-year bond jumped more than 200 basis points after the Syriza win and now yields more than 11% as of Friday. Continue reading "Get me to the Greek" →

Thank you, Mario

Posted on by George Yacik

George Yacik - INO.com Contributor - Fed & Interest Rates


I don’t know if Mario Draghi’s “historic” quantitative easing program announced Thursday will do anything to help the flat-on-its-back euro zone economy.

I’m not a trained economist, so I’m not sure exactly how buying massive quantities of already overpriced bonds is supposed to raise inflation and boost the economy, although it has been very successful in devaluing the grossly overpriced euro. But how is a cheaper currency going to help countries in the euro zone when they do most of their trading with each other?

What I am sure of is that the program will make U.S. Treasury and corporate debt securities a lot more attractive to investors, further lowering long-term interest rates here, and giving our economy, now the envy of the rest of the world, another boost.

It’s about time Europe did something for us. Continue reading "Thank you, Mario" →

Chicken Little and the Bond Market

Posted on by George Yacik

George Yacik - INO.com Contributor - Fed & Interest Rates


If you listen to some market observers, the record low yields in the Treasury bond market are warning us that the American economy is on the verge of falling into the same deflationary abyss of the euro zone and Japan. Like the Chicken Little story, if bond yields are falling, the sky must be falling, too.

With the yield on the 30-year T-bond hitting its lowest level ever last week, even lower than during the global financial crisis, they’re worried that if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates soon, we’ll shortly be back to the bad old days of 2008 and, even worse, 1929.

No less a figure than Paul Krugman, the New York Times’ economics commentator, wrote that the Swiss Central Bank’s move last week to decouple the franc from the free-falling euro is a portent of what could happen to us if we let our deflationary guard down. Continue reading "Chicken Little and the Bond Market" →

There’s Still Hope for the Fed

Posted on by George Yacik

George Yacik - INO.com Contributor - Fed & Interest Rates


The minutes of the December 16-17 Federal Open Market Committee meeting offer some hope that the Fed is finally getting over its seven-plus years’ worry that the U.S. runs the risk of falling into a deflationary spiral, similar to what we encountered during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While deflation, or even disinflation, might be a legitimate concern now in Japan and the Euro Zone, the idea that we face a similar threat seems a little hard to swallow. Perhaps this was a real concern during the panicky days of the global financial meltdown in 2008, but even then it seemed to be a stretch. Now, seven years later, it just looks ridiculous.

According to the minutes of the December meeting, released last week, the Fed’s monetary policy committee brushed off the idea that inflation would remain below the Fed’s 2% target due to the declining price of oil, which it calls “transitory,” and remaining slack in the labor market. Continue reading "There’s Still Hope for the Fed" →