Ben Bernanke
November 27, 2011(Bloomberg) -- The biggest bond dealers in the U.S. say the Federal Reserve is poised to start a new round of stimulus, injecting more money into the economy by purchasing mortgage securities instead of Treasuries.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his fellow policy makers, who bought $2.3 trillion of Treasury and mortgage-related bonds between 2008 and June, will start another program next quarter, 16 of the 21 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that trade with the central bank said in a Bloomberg News survey last week. The Fed may buy about $545 billion in home-loan debt, based on the median of the 10 firms that provided estimates.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-27/dealers-see-fed-buying-545-billion-mortgage-bonds-in-third-ease.html
To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with the dual mandate, the Committee decided today to extend the average maturity of its holdings of securities. The Committee intends to purchase, by the end of June 2012, $400 billion of Treasury securities with remaining maturities of 6 years to 30 years and to sell an equal amount of Treasury securities with remaining maturities of 3 years or less. This program should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and help make broader financial conditions more accommodative. The Committee will regularly review the size and composition of its securities holdings and is prepared to adjust those holdings as appropriate.
To help support conditions in mortgage markets, the Committee will now reinvest principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities. In addition, the Committee will maintain its existing policy of rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction.
Operation Twist: Consumer Stocks in Trouble
2011-09-26
By Becca Lipman. List compiled by Eben Esterhuizen, CFA. Data sourced from Google Finance.)
Perhaps you've already heard about the "Operation Twist," a controversial new effort of the Federal Reserve to boost the economy by driving down long-term interest rates. The name comes from the 1960s when the Fed did the same thing under the Kennedy administration, and "The Twist" was a popular dance.
Many are arguing lowering interest rates will not have a significant impact on home or car buyers because struggling consumers don't care about interest rates as much as economists expect. Their evidence?
Read more: http://community.nasdaq.com/News/2011-09/operation-twist-consumer-stocks-in-trouble.aspx?storyid=95892#ixzz1Z6kGtT3g
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Ben Bernanke, NY-JP. Power of 2011
Thanks for Stop Quantitative Easing.On February 1, 2006, President Bush appointed Bernanke to a fourteen-year term as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and to a four-year term asChairman. By virtue of the chairmanship, he sits on the Financial Stability Oversight Board that oversees the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He also serves asChairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policy making body.His first months as chairman of the Federal Reserve System were marked by difficulties communicating with the media. An advocate of more transparent Fed policyand clearer statements than Greenspan had made, he had to back away from his initial idea of stating clearer inflation goals as such statements tended to affect thestock market. During Bernanke's first term as Chairman, the Federal Reserve experienced its largest increase of power since its creation in 1913.Bernanke has been subjected to criticism concerning the late-2000s financial crisis. According to The New York Times, Bernanke "has been attacked for failing toforesee the financial crisis, for bailing out Wall Street, and, most recently, for injecting an additional $600 billion into the banking system to give the slow recoverya boost."[ In his 2009 book End the Fed, Congressman Ron Paul wrote, referring to Bernanke, "there is something fishy about the head of the world's most powerfulgovernment bureaucracy, one that is involved in a full-time counterfeiting operation to sustain monopolistic financial cartels, and the world’s most powerful centralplanner, who sets the price of money worldwide, proclaiming the glories of capitalism."He has given several lectures at the London School of Economics on monetary theory and policy and has written three textbooks on macroeconomics, and one onmicroeconomics. He was the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the editor of the AmericanEconomic Review. He is among the 50 most published economists in the world according to Research Papers in EconomicBernanke favors reducing the U.S. budget deficit, particularly by reforming the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs. During a speech delivered onApril 7, 2010, he warned that the U.S. must soon develop a "credible" plan to address the pending funding crisis faced by "entitlement programs such as SocialSecurity and Medicare" or "in the longer run we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth. Bernanke said that formulation of such a planwould help the economy now, even if actual implementation of the plan might have to wait until the economic outlook improves.
Bernanke Says Accommodative Policy Needed for ‘Uneven’ Economic Recovery
News,
November 14, 2011(Reuters) - Defending the Federal Reserve on the turf of his harshest critics, U.S. central bank chief Ben Bernanke on Thursday said the Fed was "intently" focused on lowering unemployment and warned that strains from Europe could trigger global economic shocks.
"For a lot of people, I know, it doesn't feel like the recession ever ended," Bernanke said at a town hall-style forum at an Army base outside of the Texas border town of El Paso.
"I'm not a believer in the Old Testament theory of business cycles. I think that if we can help people, we need to help people."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/11/us-usa-fed-bernanke-f-idUSTRE7AA3MV20111111
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