{"id":12298,"date":"2015-09-16T06:09:42","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T11:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12298"},"modified":"2015-09-16T06:09:42","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T11:09:42","slug":"will-the-fed-pick-a-winning-combination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12298","title":{"rendered":"Will The Fed Pick A Winning Combination?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will The Fed Pick A Winning Combination?<\/a><\/h3>\n

It\u2019s highly amusing to read all the \u2018expert\u2019 theories on a Federal Reserve hike or no hike tomorrow, but it\u2019s also obvious that nobody really has a clue, and still feel they should be heard. Don\u2019t know if that\u2019s so smart, but I guess in that world being consistently wrong is not that big a deal.<\/p>\n

Thing is, US economic numbers are so \u2018massaged\u2019 and unreliable, the Fed can pick whichever way the wind blows to argue whatever decision it makes. As long as jobs numbers get presented for instance without counting the 90-odd million Americans who are not in the labor force, and a majority of new jobs are waiters, just about anything goes in that area. Numbers on wages are just as silly.<\/p>\n

And people can make inflation a big issue, but hardly anyone even knows what inflation is. Wonder if the Fed does. It had better, because if you don\u2019t look at spending, prices don\u2019t tell you a thing. They surely must look at velocity of money charts from time to time?!<\/p>\n

The biggest thing for the Fed might, and perhaps must, be the confidence factor. It\u2019s been talking about rate hikes for so long now that if it decides to leave rates alone, it will only create more uncertainty down the road. Uncertainty about the economy (no hike would suggest a weak economy), and also about its own capabilities.<\/p>\n

If all you have is talk, people tend to take you a lot less serious. Moreover, the abject -and grossly expensive- failure of the Chinese central bank to quiet down its domestic stock markets has raised questions about the omnipotence of all central banks.<\/p>\n

This morning\u2019s spectacle of a 5% rise in Shanghai in under an hour near the close no longer serves to restore confidence, it further undermines it. Beijing doesn\u2019t seem to get that yet. But the Fed might.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will The Fed Pick A Winning Combination? It\u2019s highly amusing to read all the \u2018expert\u2019 theories on a Federal Reserve hike or no hike tomorrow, but it\u2019s also obvious that nobody really has a clue, and still feel they should be heard. Don\u2019t know if that\u2019s so smart, but I guess in that world being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[63,124,130,303,305,426,1154,431,3281,3329,7738,5177,6050,860],"class_list":["post-12298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-banks","tag-central-banks","tag-china","tag-fed","tag-federal-reserve","tag-inflation","tag-interest-rate-policy","tag-interest-rates","tag-jobs","tag-profits","tag-raul-meijer","tag-the-automatic-earth","tag-velocity-of-money","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12299,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12298\/revisions\/12299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}