The Federal Reserve said it will buy $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities each month forever, or until the U.S. job market perks up. This third round of quantitative easing, or QE3, is relatively small to the $1.25 trillion-a-month bond-buying program launched in March 2009 or the Fed’s $600 billion-a-month buying spree beginning November 2010, Read More
Morgan Stanley and Citigroup agreed to value Morgan Stanley Smith Barney at $13.5 billion, more than the outside bankers hired to mediate the deal said the joint venture brokerage was worth. According to Bloomberg, Perella Weinberg Partners priced the brokerage at the lower end of the difference between valuations submitted by Morgan Stanley and Citi, which would have resulted in a final price of less than $11.5 billion. The banks agreed on the higher value, however, fixing the price at which Morgan Stanley will acquire Citi’s stake in the partnership. Read More
Finally, sense: As you may recall, Bill Johnson was slated to assume Duke Energy’s chief executive office per the terms of a merger between Duke Energy and Progress Energy. (Mr. Johnson had run Progress Energy before the merger.) Well, Mr. Johnson did assume the office, but on the next day he left the company, scooping Read More
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has entered into an agreement to acquire the building at 33 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan,” a New York Fed spokesperson confirmed in a prepared statement issued yesterday afternoon to The Commercial Observer. “The Bank is now in a final due diligence phase prior to the expected closing in the first quarter.” Read More
Three hours before President Obama’s “eff an S & P” presser, a tidbit of news broke about a staffing change at the Federal Reserve: Nathan Sheets, the Fed’s chief international economic adviser—or: the director of the Division of International Finance—is getting out of dodge. Mr. Sheets, who started with the Federal Reserve Board in 1993 as an economist, had been there for 18 years. More importantly, he’s the third in a trend of (take a guess)… Read More
Mark it: an important moment in American history today, not even counting the time a reality television star’s consistant trolling forced the American President to present evidence of his citizenship. Rather, today was the very first U.S. Federal Reserve press conference, featuring big-money-cheap-date Ben Bernanke! What great revelations did we learn? What spiked-bat questions will Read More
The Federal Reserve today released the minutes from its Dec. 14 meeting to determine just how much money it would create out of thin air as part of its continuing effort to stimulate the economy.
The Fed determined that labor demand was increasing but not enough to stave off high levels of unemployment. Industrial Read More
The United States Federal Reserve, which is charged with overseeing the financial system, is not convinced that there’s any hedge fund that could endanger the entirety of U.S. capitalism, and therefore it’s not convinced that the funds need Fed oversight.
Reuters reports on the Fed’s assessment, citing a person familiar with the Fed’s position. Read More
The Federal Reserve continues to view the economic recovery as too slow for comfort, and is therefore proceeding with its controversial plan to print $600 billion and buy long-dated Treasury securities with the newly created funds, the central bank announced today. It cited several factors in this decision that are probably well known to Read More
