Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the Fed may begin to pull back its stimulus if the economy continues to improve through the end of the year, adding that the unemployment rate will likely be 7 percent when the Fed begins to drawdown its stimulus.
The Federal Reserve won't be making an immediate changes to its $85 billion a month bond purchasing stimulus program, but if the agency's expectations hold true there could be a change in policy announced as early as this fall.
The Fed, which has injected trillions of dollars into the slowly recovering American economy, made an announcement on its intentions in three parts on Wednesday. This is the Fed's most closely watched announcement since a third round of its bond purchasing program, or "quantitative easing" in September last year .... http://abcnews.go.com
We’re now five years into the worst recovery in the post-WWII period.
Based simply on historical business cycles, we should already be out of recovery and into a “growth” stage for the US economy. This should have happened even with barely any stimulus from the Fed.
Instead, the Fed has spent TRILLIONS of Dollars and failed to deliver anything resembling economic growth. The number of people who are of working age who are actually working has barely budged since the 2009 low.
In plain terms, this chart shows us point blank that all the talk of “unemployment falling” is total BS. The Feds simply alter their methodology to make the employment picture look better, but that doesn’t change the fact that jobs have not and are not coming back in any meaningful way.
During this period, we had QE 1, QE 2, Operation Twist 2, QE 3 and QE 4. Where in the above chart do you see any real improvement in jobs as a result of these efforts? What data is the Fed looking at when it talks about “recovery” (other than the stock market and housing market which are once again bubbles)? .... http://investmentwatchblog.com
For the first time in its 27-year history, a prestigious award for enhancing the global food supply has gone to a creator of genetically modified crops, a top scientist at Monsanto. The choice is likely to add more heat to an intense debate about the role biotechnology can play in combating world hunger.
Robert T. Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, will share the $250,000 World Food Prize with two other scientists who helped devise how to insert foreign genes into plants: Marc Van Montagu of Belgium and Mary-Dell Chilton of the United States.
The announcement was made in Washington on Wednesday, accompanied by a speech from Secretary of State John Kerry .... http://12160.info
FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged thelaw enforcement agency uses drone aircraft in the United States for surveillance in certain difficult cases.
Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that drones are used by the FBI in a “very, very minimal way and very seldom.”
