Today the Federal Reserve is widely expected to announce that short-term interest rates will remain unchanged. The Fed says that its decisions about whether or not to raise interest rates will be “data dependent,” but this doesn’t inspire much confidence, because the ...
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I spent most of my childhood summers in the woods of Maine and New Hampshire. Trips to New Hampshire usually meant hiking in the White Mountains, whose Presidential range is within site of the Mount Washington Hotel, a.k.a. Bretton Woods. Towards the tail end of World War II, Bretton Woods ...
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The prices for bonds move inversely to the interest that they pay to investors. When bonds are in high demand, prices increase and bond yields decrease. Probably the biggest financial story for 2014 thus far is the unexpected demand for bonds. If you were wondering just how strong the ...
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The Financial Times published some startling statistics yesterday about how the U.S. labor force participation rate has now dropped below that of the U.K. The participation rate measures the proportion of adults (above 16 years old) who are either working or looking for work. This is the ...
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It’s easy to forget about corporate earnings in the wildly volatile market of 2011. For the time being, macroeconomic events—right now primarily the European debt crisis—are driving stock prices. In October the market’s correlation, the measure of how many stocks move in the same direction, was ...
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