“Last chance”…to get their act together!

Unfortunately, that´s very unlikely as seen here: “The Fed Strives for a Clear Signal on Interest Rates”:

Federal Reserve officials are widely expected to announce Wednesday that short-term interest rates will remain near zero, leaving mid-December as the central bank’s last chance to raise rates this year.

The timetable poses twin challenges for Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen: Deciding whether the U.S. economy is ready for an interest-rate increase, and signaling central bank intentions without causing further market confusion.

Mike Belongia and Peter Ireland have just published “The Fed Has Not Become More Transparent”:

We applaud the Fed’s willingness under Bernanke and Janet Yellen to announce publicly its commitment to a 2 percent inflation target and acknowledge the consistency of its statements regarding a balanced approach to stabilizing inflation and unemployment.  This information makes clear what the central bank hopes to achieve with its monetary policies over both intermediate and longer horizons.  At the same time, however, we join others in wondering whether the “lively debate” that continues to be evident in the frequent, but often conflicting statements of Fed officials clarifies or confuses what monetary policy is doing and why.

John Taylor agrees:

“I don’t really understand what is unclear right now,” said William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, during an appearance at a panel in Washington this month.

“Are you kidding?” Stanford University economist and Fed critic John Taylor said. “No one knows what you’re doing.”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.