Quote from Bitstream:
rates should go up, no q.
published inflation figures are concocted and a total joke. and for how much the fed discounts People's intelligence, just look up on their website the incredibly shallow and puerile excuse it has given for ceasing to publish M3 figures. for an economy soon having to merge, for it can't be sustained by issuing and buying [trading] debt via an already soft currency yet relentlessly softened by the fractional banking system, it is not only convenient those numbers can't be seen any longer, but necessary.
Tonight's prize for economic illiteracy. It's amazing how regularly this crap gets churned out around here.
Three-month bills, to quote Bloomberg, "climbed this week, sending three-month bill yields below 3 percent for the first time since August, as concern over banks' willingness to lend drove investors to the relative safety of U.S. government debt."
Anyone who thinks a 3-month bill rate below 3 and a Fed Funds rate at 4.5 requires a rise in rates is, um, how shall I put this diplomatically, a person who should not be investing in anything more adventurous than a one year CD.
The Fed had no business raising rates over 4.5 in this cycle, or any cycle since the mid Nineties. As has happened with ridiculous regularity over this timeframe, every time they've done so, they've had to face a crisis, whether the Asian/Mexican/Russian defaults and LTCM, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, or this.
As for the usual nonsense about inflation, the market is in the business of thinking about the future, not the past.
