The qualitative Federal Reserve

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 16, 2010 in Blog, Predictions | 3 comments Recall that the Federal Reserve announced a “quantitative easing” strategy earlier this month.  The idea was to inject $600 billion into the U.S. economy by buying outstanding bonds.  That, in turn, was supposed to create greater liquidity in the economy and drive down the value of the U.S. dollar.  I argued at the time that the primary benefit of the Federal Reserve’s actions...
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Wrap up of the G-20 summit

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 12, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments Today was the final day of the G-20 summit meeting in Seoul, South Korea.  The G-20 is the organization that gathers the world’s 20 largest economies together to discuss global economic issues.  Overwhelmingly, nothing of any substance ever gets done.  Effectively these gatherings are kind of like going out to lunch with old work colleagues.  You don’t go to the luncheon so much...
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Putting the electric in General Electric

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 11, 2010 in Blog | 14 comments Hello and good morning! General Electric this morning announced that it is going to buy 25,000 electric vehicles for its fleet by 2015.  Because General Electric provides much of the componentry and services much of the value chain of the electric car markets it is effectively jump-starting one of its major strategic areas of interest: the environment. CEO Jeffrey Immelt has had my attention...
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The Fed’s “quantitative easing” is a show of national strength

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 9, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments I wrote last week about the U.S. Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing.”  This is the purchasing of billions of dollars of debt by the Fed in the open market.  Each time they purchase some debt it adds U.S. currency to the global marketplace.  The greater the supply of U.S. dollars, the lower the price of the U.S. dollar.  So effectively QE is a way of weakening the U.S....
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Don’t anthropomorphize markets

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 9, 2010 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments For today’s post I wanted to decry a financial markets press tactic that is as old as the markets themselves.  Namely, the media love to anthropomorphize markets, especially the stock market.  In other words, this is the tendency of reporters to ascribe human behavior to the price gyrations of stocks. Here is an example from today’s Wall Street Journal: “U.S. stocks wavered as...
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Codes of ethics do matter

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 9, 2010 in Blog | 1 comment There was a massive outcry against MSNBC for having suspended its Countdown host, Keith Olbermann, for having donated monies to three political candidates in contravention to its code of ethics.  I must confess that I am a big fan of Keith Olbermann.  But I must also confess I am a bigger fan of codes of ethics being enforced than of Keith Olbermann.  In fact, one of the reasons that I so enjoy...
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Big EU structural problems addressed

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 8, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments Recall that in the springtime this year there was a massive European debt crisis – something that I covered extensively here on the blog.  Financial markets around the world were roiled by the possibility that Greece was going to default on its sovereign debt.  And Portugal, Italy and Spain were considered to be not too far behind in, what was to be, a cascade of non-payment doom.  Or so...
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