{"id":187250,"date":"2013-05-01T19:56:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-02T00:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/05\/01\/fed-stays-course\/"},"modified":"2013-05-01T19:56:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-02T00:56:00","slug":"fed-stays-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/05\/01\/fed-stays-course\/","title":{"rendered":"Fed Stays Course"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/05\/02\/business\/economy\/federal-reserve-to-continue-stimulus-efforts.html?hpw\">their quantitative easing program continues unabated<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that its economic stimulus campaign would press forward at the same pace it has maintained since December, putting to rest for now any suggestion that it was leaning toward doing less.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Fed emphasized that it was ready to increase or decrease its efforts to spur growth and reduce unemployment as necessary, a more balanced position than it took earlier in the year, reflecting the reality that a strong winter has once again yielded to a disappointing spring.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">It was the first time that the Fed had explicitly mentioned the possibility of doing more in a policy statement, although officials, including the Fed\u2019s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, have made the point repeatedly in public remarks. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Fed maintained a relatively sunny economic outlook in its statement, released after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee. It said that the economy was expanding at a \u201cmoderate pace\u201d and that the labor market had shown \u201csome improvement.\u201d It added, however, that federal spending cuts were \u201crestraining economic growth,\u201d an implicit critique of the rest of the government.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">That language was stronger than the Fed had used in previous assessments of the economic impact of fiscal policy. Fed officials have repeatedly expressed frustration that fiscal policy is working at cross-purposes with their own monetary policy. The statement also noted that the pace of inflation had slackened, a potential sign of economic weakness. Bringing the annual rate of inflation closer to its target of 2 percent has been a primary goal of the Fed\u2019s four-year-old stimulus campaign, but the statement expressed little concern about the recent deceleration to a pace of only about half that level.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yeah, calling out the entire deficit fetish in DC is a good thing too.<\/p>\n<p>I still think that Bernanke&#8217;s mental exercise, dropping massive quantities of cash from helicopters, is the way to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So their quantitative easing program continues unabated: The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that its economic stimulus campaign would press forward at the same pace it has maintained since December, putting to rest for now any suggestion that it was leaning toward doing less.The Fed emphasized that it was ready to increase or decrease its efforts &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,1004,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-finance","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187250"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}