A final confirmation vote on Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve was delayed until early January after the U.S. Senate dropped plans to consider her nomination this weekend, reports Bloomberg.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid late yesterday announced an agreement under which senators will vote to advance Yellen’s nomination today, then take a holiday break and return Jan. 6 for the final vote. Confirmation votes for three other presidential nominees are set for today.
According to Bloomberg, faced with vows by Republicans to use all the available time to delay a confirmation vote on Yellen until 6 p.m. tomorrow, Reid agreed to take up the matter next month in exchange for locking in votes on three other nominees.
The Senate today will vote on confirming John Koskinen to be the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Alejandro Mayorkas to be deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and Brian Davis to be a federal judge in Florida.
Bottom line: It appears that the delay is so senators can leave for their home states today and that extended Republican debate on the Yellen nomination, which will do nothing to prevent her eventual nomination,will take place in Jnauary.
Manipulations Rule The Markets — Paul Craig Roberts
ReplyDeleteMoreover, the Fed’s outlook for the economy is mixed. The Fed says that “recovery in the housing sector slowed somewhat in recent months,” so why reduce purchases of mortgage-backed financial instruments? And surely the Fed is aware that the U3 unemployment rate has declined because discouraged workers who cannot find a job are not counted among the unemployed. As all measures show, real median family income and real per capita income are lower today than in 2007, and real consumer credit is not growing except for student loans. Without rising aggregate demand to drive the economy, why does the Fed see a recovery instead of faulty statistical measures that do not accurately portray economic reality?
The financial media’s reporting on the stock market’s response to the Fed’s announcement has its own puzzles. I have not seen the entirety of the news reports, but what I have seen says that the equity market rose because investors interpreted the reduction in bond purchases as signaling the Fed’s vote of confidence in the economy.
Previously when the Fed announced that it might cut back its bond purchases, the markets dropped sharply, and the Fed quickly back-tracked. Everyone knows that the high prices in the bond and equity markets are the result of the liquidity pouring out of the Fed and that a curtailment of this liquidity will adversely affect prices. So why this time did prices go up instead of down?
Pam Martens points out that there is evidence of manipulation. http://wallstreetonparade.com
As market data indicates, the initial response to the Fed’s announcement was a sharp move down as market participants sold stocks on the Fed’s announcement (see the chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in Pam Martens’ article). But within a few minutes the market changed course and rose on panic short-covering just as sharply as it had fallen.
The question is: who provided the upward push that panicked the shorts and sent the market up 292 points? Was it the plunge protection team and the NY Fed’s trading floor? Was it the large banks acting in concert with the Fed? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this was an orchestrated event that forestalled a market decline.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/12/20/manipulations-rule-markets-paul-craig-roberts/