Trader’s Narrative

In today’s Washington Post Op-Ed, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman, Ben Bernanke, basically admits that the $600 billion quantitative easing program announced yesterday is meant to propel stock prices higher:
The FOMC intends to buy an additional $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by mid-2011 and will continue to reinvest repayments of principal on its holdings of […]

At the start of the summer the fiscal woes in Europe had hammered the Euro currency and caused the public sentiment for it to fall into an abyss. There was hardly a day without harsh news out of Ireland, Spain, Greece or some other European country which many thought threatened the very future of the […]

Earlier this week the NBER, as official guardians of recession labels, declared the most recent economic weakness over. That means the recession that started on December 2007 ended June 2009. The 15 months that it took for the NBER to come to that conclusion may seem rather lengthy but it is about the average time […]

Today’s FOMC statement from the Federal Reserve is below, compared to the previous statement from August 10th. The yellow text highlights the changes for easier prognostication purposes.
The main takeaway is a continuation of the zero interest rate policy due to continuing economic weakness. As well, deflation continues to be the main concern, rather than inflation.

Source: […]

The developed world is getting older and that has major implications for asset pricing. Recently we looked at the correlation between demographics and PE (price/earnings) ratios: Predicting P/E Ratios With Demographics.
A working paper from the Bank for International Settlements looks at the effect of the aging population of several major countries on the respective real […]