Fed Watching For Fun Profit

In predicting the major stock, bond, commodity, and foreign exchange markets around the world, nothing is more important than to anticipate the actions of the Federal Reserve System's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets the course of monetary policy in the United States. By controlling the key interest rate in the money markets and other monetary variables, the FOMC has an enormous impact on the global economy and financial markets.Watching the Fed closely are not only Wall Street's economists and investment strategists but also reporters and commentators at the major financial news organizations. In fact, anyone involved in investment matters and business activities anywhere in the world needs to watch the Fed, because its policies have powerful impacts not only on the US economy but also on the global economy.For participants in the financial markets, anticipating a policy change by the Fed and positioning an investment portfolio or speculative trade accordingly can result in big gains. Conversely, failing to anticipate a move by the Fed can result in big losses or missed opportunities for gains.In this unique primer, Dr. Edward Yardeni, one of the world's most experienced and widely followed "Fed watchers," helps investors to understand the FOMC's decision-making process, anticipate its moves, and profit from those insights.

There has been much confusion about corporate profits. As a result, there has been lots of sloppy analysis and misinformed discussion of such important issues as the central role of profits in economic growth, the trend of profits, the corporate tax rate, the profit margin, profits' share of national income, and corporate share buybacks.The confusion has played into the hands of progressives, who claim that the profit motive results in income and wealth inequality. As I will show in this study, their narrative of the relationship between profits and prosperity is wrong and misleadingly pessimistic. Market-driven profit is the source of widespread prosperity, not its nemesis.

I started my career on Wall Street in 1978. For the past 40 years on the Street, I have been thinking and writing about the economy and financial markets as both an economist and an investment strategist. While I have a solid academic background to be a Wall Street prognosticator, I learned a great deal on the job. In this book, I share my professional insights into predicting the economy and financial markets.

A Federal Reserve insider pulls back the curtain on the secretive institution that controls America’s economy After correctly predicting the housing crash of 2008 and quitting her high-ranking Wall Street job, Danielle DiMartino Booth was surprised to find herself recruited as an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, one of the regional centers of our complicated and widely misunderstood Federal Reserve System. She was shocked to discover just how much tunnel vision, arrogance, liberal dogma, and abuse of power drove the core policies of the Fed. DiMartino Booth found a cabal of unelected academics who made decisions without the slightest understanding of the real world, just a slavish devo­tion to their theoretical models. Over the next nine years, she and her boss, Richard Fisher, tried to speak up about the dangers of Fed policies such as quanti­tative easing and deeply depressed interest rates. But as she puts it, “In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand that the Fed was simply too big to fight.” Now DiMartino Booth explains what really happened to our economy after the fateful date of December 8, 2008, when the Federal Open Market Committee approved a grand and unprecedented ex­periment: lowering interest rates to zero and flooding America with easy money. As she feared, millions of individuals, small businesses, and major corporations made rational choices that didn’t line up with the Fed’s “wealth effect” models. The result: eight years and counting of a sluggish “recovery” that barely feels like a recovery at all. While easy money has kept Wall Street and the wealthy afloat and thriving, Main Street isn’t doing so well. Nearly half of men eighteen to thirty-four live with their parents, the highest level since the end of the Great Depression. Incomes are barely increasing for anyone not in the top ten percent of earners. And for those approaching or already in retirement, extremely low interest rates have caused their savings to stagnate. Millions have been left vulnerable and afraid. Perhaps worst of all, when the next financial crisis arrives, the Fed will have no tools left for managing the panic that ensues. And then what? DiMartino Booth pulls no punches in this exposé of the officials who run the Fed and the toxic culture they created. She blends her firsthand experiences with what she’s learned from dozens of high-powered market players, reams of financial data, and Fed docu­ments such as transcripts of FOMC meetings. Whether you’ve been suspicious of the Fed for decades or barely know anything about it, as DiMartino Booth writes, “Every American must understand this extraordinarily powerful institution and how it affects his or her everyday life, and fight back.”

This book cuts through the myster of the FED, providing readers with a jargon free guide.

Several Progressive politicians have pounced on corporate share buybacks lately. They see buybacks as a major source of income and wealth inequality, subpar capital spending, and lackluster productivity. In their opinion, buybacks have contributed greatly to the stagnation of the standards of living of most Americans in recent years. So they want to limit buybacks or even ban them. Some of Wall Street's stock-market bears have been growling about buybacks as well. They've been arguing that buybacks have rigged the stock market in favor of the bulls. They claim that companies buy back their stock to boost their share prices, using debt to finance this dubious activity. As a result, corporate balance sheets have become increasingly leveraged, which makes them vulnerable to a recession. Widespread corporate leverage, in turn, would exacerbate any economic downturn. The bears therefore remain bearish and expect to be vindicated with a vengeance, eventually. In this study, Edward Yardeni and Joseph Abbott show that the facts don't support either narrative. The most common reason that S&P 500 companies buy back their shares is to offset the dilution in the number of shares outstanding that results when employee compensation takes the form of stock options and stock grants that vest over time, not just for top executives but for many employees. In effect, the ultimate source of funds for most stock buybacks is the employee compensation expense item on corporate income statements, not bond issuance as the bears contend. The authors explain that the bull market in stocks has boosted buybacks to a greater extent than buybacks have boosted the market, whereas the opposite is more widely believed. Rising stock prices increase the attractiveness of paying some of employees' compensation with stock grants. Buybacks then are necessary to offset the dilution of earnings per share. While the latest bull market, like previous ones, has been driven by rising earnings, it's a Wall Street legend that earnings per share have been boosted artificially and significantly by stock buybacks. It may seem that way only because what lift buybacks have provided to stock prices is highly visible, occurring in the open market, whereas companies' need to offset stock issuance with stock repurchases is less apparent. The authors also refute Progressives' pervasive narrative that most Americans' standards of living have stagnated in recent decades and that buybacks per se have worsened income inequality.

This is a book for people like us, and we all know who we are. We make our own hours, keep our own profits, chart our own way. We have things like gigs, contracts, clients, and assignments. All of us are working toward our dreams: doing our own work, on our own time, on our own terms. We have no real boss, no corporate nameplate, no cubicle of our very own. Unfortunately, we also have no 401(k)s and no one matching them, no benefits package, and no one collecting our taxes until April 15th. It’s time to take stock of where you are and where you want to be. Ask yourself: Who is planning for your retirement? Who covers your expenses when clients flake out and checks are late? Who is setting money aside for your taxes? Who is responsible for your health insurance? Take a good look in the mirror: You are. The Money Book for Freelancers, Part-Timers, and the Self-Employed describes a completely new, comprehensive system for earning, spending, saving, and surviving as an independent worker. From interviews with financial experts to anecdotes from real-life freelancers, plus handy charts and graphs to help you visualize key concepts, you’ll learn about topics including: • Managing Cash Flow When the Cash Isn’t Flowing Your Way • Getting Real About What You’re Really Earning • Tools for Getting Out of Debt and Into Financial Security • Saving Consistently When You Earn Irregularly • What To Do When a Client’s Check Doesn’t Come In • Health Savings Accounts and How To Use Them • Planning for Retirement, Taxes and Dreams—All On Your Own

What do an investor trying to decide whether or not now is a good time to buy stocks, a wannabe first-time homeowner shopping around for a mortgage, and a business owner considering taking out a business loan all have in common? All three of them can be seriously affected by the decisions of the Federal Reserve'. In predicting the major stock, bond, commodity, and foreign exchange markets around the world, nothing is more important than to anticipate the actions of the Federal Reserve System's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). By controlling the key interest rate in the money markets and other monetary variables, the FOMC has an enormous impact on the global economy and financial markets. In fact, anyone involved in investment matters and business activities anywhere in the world needs to watch the Fed, because its policies have powerful impacts not only on the US economy but also on the global economy. For participants in the financial markets, anticipating a policy change by the Fed and positioning an investment portfolio or speculative trade accordingly can result in big gains. Conversely, failing to anticipate a move by the Fed can result in big losses or missed opportunities for gains. In this unique primer, this book will help investors to understand the FOMC's decision-making process, anticipate its moves, and profit from those insights.

A proven production model is described, which is capable of producing an income from a small acreage of equal or superior to that of off-farm jobs.