What Happens When Artificially Low Interest Rates . . . . . Rise? Does “financial repression” have a better ring to it than “market manipulation?” If so, you’ll like this piece from today’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page: However well-intentioned, the Federal Reserve’s continued purchase of long-term Treasury securities risks camouflaging the country’s true cost of...Read More
[Editor’s Note: lots of deals(!) equal few(er) posts.] A prolonged period of very low interest rates will decapitalize defined-benefit pension funds”both private and public”throughout the country. In California, for example, pension actuaries presume a yield on their asset portfolios of about 7.5% just to break even in meeting their annuity obligations, even if they were fully funded....Read More
Shackling the Bond Vigilantes In a world where pundits divide into those who think the federal government should be doing more to help the economy, and those who think it’s already done (way) too much, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman lands squarely in the former camp. In fact, you might say that he is...Read More
