Federal Reserve

America’s central bankers gathered for the first time this year earlier in the week.  Each year, four presidents of the Fed’s regional banks serve a 12-month term on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to help the seven governors and the President of the New York Regional Fed Bank set monetary policy, making this the first time for the current mix to decide on interest rat

Black Friday’s moniker is explained as the day when retailers go from being in the red for the year into positive earnings. Atlas won’t argue, but we cannot say for sure that this is still what happens. After your heart calms down from all the savings on Friday, you can hit Main Street America for Small Business Saturday. What a weekend. And then when you get bac

Every six weeks the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meets to discuss monetary policies and to make any changes to it which they deem necessary.  Their latest two-day meeting ended last Wednesday with the 12-person committee unanimously voting to raise the overnight lending rate banks charge each other by 0.75 percentage points; the range for this type of loan now stands at 3.75 - 4.0

Family Feud is a gameshow which started in 1976 and aired through 1985.  After a few years hiatus, it returned in 1988, only to end again in 1995.  Then as the last century came to a close, it managed to make another comeback, one which has lasted through today.  It pits two families against each other, competing to determine answers to survey questions previously asked to a grou

There are many sticking points in the American economy these days.  Inflation comes to mind.  So does our Federal Reserve.  Or what about the growth rate of the economy?  It’s not quite molasses-like just yet, but the pace of output is gaining viscosity.

Software runs our world.  Whatever apparatus you’re reading this note on has programs and operating systems which allow you to receive and delete (hopefully not too quickly) this note.  Some of the code runs in the background doing things I’ll never understand, but other parts of it create feature or functionality designed to be useful to us as users.  Occasionally, a

Each year the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve hosts a symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  It’s a who’s who of economics, finance, and central banking.  The world’s brain trust gathers to enjoy the bears, do some fishing, and see the natural beauty that accompanies any event with the Grand Tetons as a backdrop.  In between sessions with the great outdo

Technologist are busy creating machines capable of making human-like decisions in an instant.  Self-driving cars are probably the most obvious example.  In 2014 researchers at the MIT Media Lab introduced the Moral Machine, a website to crowdsource individuals’ decisions on how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in accident scenarios (e.g., how should it react when faced