Janet Yellen

AP's Boak: With the Economy So Good, Why Won't Fed Raise Rates?
By Tom Blumer | September 19, 2015 | 10:51 PM EDT

The business press just can't understand why the Federal Reserve decided not to raise interest rates on Thursday. After all, these alleged journalists have been telling us for months bordering on years that U.S. economy is really in good shape. So it should be able to handle a rate hike, especially after over seven years of rates at essentially zero. The problem is that they now believe their own bogus blather. The U.S. economy is not in good shape, and data seen during the past several weeks show that the situation is deteriorating, not improving.

Excerpts from an early Friday report at the Associated Press by Josh Boak illustrate how out of touch the business press really is (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Business Wires Pretend That U.S. Weakness Didn't Influence Fed's No-Change Rate Decision
By Tom Blumer | September 19, 2015 | 10:02 AM EDT

The business press is trying to convince readers, listeners, and viewers that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve kept interest rates at zero not because of U.S. economic conditions, which supposedly "look good" with "steady economic growth." No-no. She stayed the course because of the troubled tglobal economy.

Thursday evening, Reuters wrote that the Fed failed to move "in a bow to worries about the global economy, financial market volatility and sluggish inflation at home." Bloomberg directly blamed "China growth concerns." The Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger cited "a weak global economy, persistently low inflation and unstable financial markets." None of the three noted the deteriorating situation in the U.S., and the only item I could find which cited the Fed's full set of pathetic annual U.S. growth projections was a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Crickets: Fed Official Finds No Evidence That $4.5 Trillion in QE Accomplished Anything
By Tom Blumer | August 20, 2015 | 10:26 AM EDT

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the economy under Ronald Reagan was so obviously robust.

Fast-forwarding 28 years, the author of a July Federal Reserve white paper on the Fed's Keynesian-based "quantitative easing" program contends that "There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed—inflation and real economic activity." In other words, there is no evidence that $4.5 trillion in funny money with which the economy has been saddled has accomplished anything. In the establishment press, only CNBC's Jeff Cox has covered it (bolds are mine):

AP Wants Readers to Believe Fed's Easing 'Is Over' — With $4 Trillion in Holdings
By Tom Blumer | October 30, 2014 | 11:51 PM EDT

An unbylined "Q&A" column at the Associated Press yesterday began with the following false declaration: "The $4 trillion experiment is over." That just isn't so.

Maybe the Federal Reserve is done building up its debt holdings — that is by no means certain — but the "experiment" known as "quantitative easing," or "QE," won't be over until the Fed fully unwinds those balances. In the meantime, it has unwarranted leverage over the stock and bond markets. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has what appears to be a de facto veto over Washington policies she doesn't like should she decide to use her leverage in that manner. The rest of the AP item wasn't much better, particularly how it wormed around the reality that if the Fed wishes to avoid winding down its balances, it's going to have to keep buying Treasury and mortgage-backed securities as current holding mature:

AP's Matthew Brown Gives 600-Word Story to 'About Ten Demonstrators' at Jackson Hole Fed Meeting
By Tom Blumer | August 23, 2014 | 10:38 AM EDT

The Associated Press's Top Business News page lists the headlines and opening passages of what the wire service believes are the ten most important business stories at the moment. Its 9:16 a.m. version had a story entitled "JACKSON HOLE DEMONSTRATORS RALLY AGAINST RATE HIKE" listed fifth. Earlier in the morning it was fourth.

Surely, I thought to myself, this must be about a group of at least several hundred to merit this level of attention. Not at all. The opening sentence at Matthew Brown's Friday afternoon story tells us it was "a group of about 10," but that one group member somehow got to speak with Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen (bolds are mine):

AP Pair Create a Math Problem In Projecting 2014 Growth of 'Nearly Three Percent'
By Tom Blumer | May 4, 2014 | 9:56 AM EDT

In a Friday afternoon dispatch issued in the wake of the government's jobs report earlier that day, Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak at the Associated Press wrote that "most economists ... forecast a strong rebound in economic growth - to a 3.5 percent annual rate in the current April-June quarter. And growth should reach nearly 3 percent for the full year, up from 1.9 percent in 2013, they expect."

There are two problems with that prediction. The first lies in how strong the third and fourth quarters will have to be for the economy to get "nearly 3 percent" for the full year, given the tiny first-quarter annualized growth of 0.1 percent reported on Wednesday. The second and perhaps more crucial issue is that the full-year estimate significantly exceeds the "altered assessment" at the Fed concerning how fast it thinks the economy can grow without running the risk of igniting inflation.

Greenspan: ‘Government Intervention Has Been So Horrendous' Businesses Can’t Plan For Future
By Noel Sheppard | December 8, 2013 | 11:42 AM EST

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made some rather ominous economic observations Sunday.

Appearing on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, Greenspan said, “[T]he level of uncertainty about the very long-term future is far greater than at any time I particularly remember.” He blamed it on “government intervention [that] has been so horrendous that businesses cannot basically decide what to do about the future” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Networks Tout Fed Nominee Yellen’s ‘Brilliance’
By Sean Long | October 10, 2013 | 3:47 PM EDT

President Obama nominated Janet Yellen, Fed vice chair, to head the Federal Reserve on Oct. 9. If confirmed, she will take on Ben Bernanke’s role as chairman and be the first woman in that role. Networks lauded her nomination that evening, after having paid little attention to her liberal policies in recent months.

Broadcast network evening and morning shows were giddy at the nomination of Yellen. Her economic experience, intelligence and “working class roots” were all praised the night of her nomination and the following morning.  

Miss America More Important to Media than Fed Nominee
By Sean Long | October 9, 2013 | 2:22 PM EDT

The next Federal Reserve Chairman will be Janet Yellen. President Barack Obama plans to nominate her on Oct. 9. Ahead of the announcement, Yellen, the liberal Fed vice chairman, was considered the most likely candidate to replace Ben Bernanke ever since Larry Summers, her chief rival for the nomination, bowed out of the race on Sept. 16.

She was a frontrunner even before Summers’ withdrawal. But between July 12 and Oct. 8, the networks paid very little attention to Yellen and the Fed candidacy. In fact, they spent more time covering Miss America in one day, than in three months of coverage of the future Fed chairman.