STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 15 November 2012

[Demeter]

35. The Fed Slapped First!

Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen who is rumored to have a shot at becoming Chairman, if Ben Bernanke decides to abandon ship in early 2014...extended the Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) even further. It had already been extended and re-extended and now is scheduled to run until mid-2015. But she extended it to eternity apparently when she said that she was “strongly supportive” of decoupling rate increases from the calendar and pegging them instead to the unemployment rate.

She followed in the footsteps of Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, who’d proposed to keep ZIRP effective until the unemployment rate dropped to 7%. Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota too had backed that idea, but his trigger would be an unemployment rate of 5.5%! An elusive date is to be replaced by an equally elusive unemployment rate. ZIRP forever!

Yellen also explained that the Fed’s 2% inflation target—based on PCE, so maybe 3% CPI—is not a “ceiling” but a guideline. Or perhaps a floor; a policy that might lower the unemployment rate, she reassured us, would lead to inflation above the guideline. So her plan is clear: wealth confiscation will continue through yields that will remain below inflation year after year until bond investors and savers have been bled dry. And if investors don’t like getting bled dry the slow way, the Fed keeps implying, they need to invest in riskier assets, such as the stock market, in order to re-inflate the bubbles that had been so devastating already.

But by the time the markets closed, the manipulative power of Yellen’s words had dissipated, and the DOW was down 1.45% for the day, at a time when a 10-year Treasury note yields 1.6% in a year! So savers, plow your savings into the stock market. The Fed wants you to....



Read more: http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2012/11/14/ouch-the-bundesbank-slaps-the-fed-in-the-face.html#ixzz2CJCiavt5