{"id":192548,"date":"2009-03-20T17:26:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-20T22:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/20\/economics-update-256\/"},"modified":"2009-03-20T17:26:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-20T22:26:00","slug":"economics-update-256","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/20\/economics-update-256\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/e4c6fdd6-14b8-11de-8cd1-0000779fd2ac.html\">commodities markets surged<\/a> as a result of the Fed&#8217;s quantitative easing, which means that they are expecting inflation there, which has, among other things, put <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/03\/20\/markets\/oil.reut\/index.htm\">oil at a 4-month high<\/a>,<\/p>\n<p>The fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/topNews\/idUSTRE52J3SR20090320?feedType=RSS&amp;feedName=topNews\">the 2009 US budget deficit has just been revised higher<\/a> may also be contributing to traders&#8217; positions.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, Bernanke is primarily interested in preventing deflation, so this is a good thing, though I wonder how effective he will be.<\/p>\n<p>Case in point: investors <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/\/id\/29778245\">requested only  $4.7 billion out of $200 billion available for the Fed small business and consumer lending program<\/a>, the TALF.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a confidence problem, and I really think that the first step to restoring confidence needs to be removing the malefactors in finance who screwed this up in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>The dollar <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601087&amp;sid=aEhdEIIoiwWE&amp;refer=home\">rose today<\/a>, largely on the belief that yesterday&#8217;s drop indicated a time for profit taking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, the commodities markets surged as a result of the Fed&#8217;s quantitative easing, which means that they are expecting inflation there, which has, among other things, put oil at a 4-month high, The fact that the 2009 US budget deficit has just been revised higher may also be contributing to traders&#8217; positions. Of course, Bernanke &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,1135,1004,1200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-energy","category-finance","category-inflation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192548"}],"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=192548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}