Janet Yellen’s job: The Federal Reserve has economic and political headaches

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The Fed was right to raise rates this week. It should be cautious about its next move

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Janet’s job

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The Federal Reserve

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The lessons from Aleppo’s tragic fate

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Janet Yellen’s job

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WHEN, a year ago, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since the financial crisis, it did not intend to dilly-dally. Rate-setters pencilled in four more rises for 2016. In the end it took until this week for the Fed to lift rates again, to a target range of 0.5-0.75%. The delay reflected both a wobbly world economy and the Fed’s realisation that the structural forces keeping rates low, such as slow productivity growth, are more powerful than it had previously thought.

The Fed was right to sit on its hands for a …

via Economic Crisis http://ift.tt/2gOzIjS

Holiday traditions: The Fed finally manages to lift rates in 2016

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TODAY, finance and economics journalist gathered for a long-awaited Federal Reserve announcement: that the Fed's benchmark interest rate would rise once more, by 25 basis points, to a range between 0.5% and 0.75%. If the scene looked familiar, well, no surprise there. It was December a year ago that the Federal Reserve announced another increase in its benchmark interest rate, of 25 basis points—the first in nearly a decade. It was also December a year ago that Fed projections suggested that rates would soar upward in 2016, to close to 1.5% by year's end. The Fed has repeated that tradition as well; the projections published today repeat last year's heroic call, of a rate near 1.5% one year hence.Whether the third act of the holiday tradition—an inevitably disappointing performance of inflation and wage growth, which forces the Fed to abandon all but one of its expected rate hikes—will also be repeated remains to be seen. In some important ways, conditions this year are not all that different from those which prevailed in late 2015. The unemployment rate is a few tenths of a percentage point lower. Inflation remains below the Fed's 2% target. Global economic growth is plodding along. Perhaps most important, interest rates around the world remain at historically …

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Dial M For Money: Can Mobile Banking Lift People Out Of Poverty?

We look at the remarkable findings from a new study of Kenya’s M-PESA system, out in ‘Science.’

via Economy : NPR http://ift.tt/2hg78q5