Powell Is A "Prisoner Of History": Volcker Bashes Bernanke & Yellen

In his new book, “Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government,” by Paul Volcker (1979-1987) with Christine Harper, the former Fed Chairman delivers a sound rebuke to Chairmen Ben Bernanke (2006-2014) and Janet Yellen (2014-2018), and other Fed governors and economists, for fretting overmuch about deflation. He argues that the true danger is that loose monetary policy leads to inflation and market contagion caused by the manipulation of risk preferences. Volcker specifically chides Bernanke and Yellen for their fixation on a two percent inflation target, one of the main ornaments on the data dependent Fed Christmas Tree. “How did central bankers fall into the trap of assigning such weight to tiny changes in a single statistic, with all of its inherent weakness?” he asks. Good question. Volcker writes in Bloomberg: ''“Deflation is a threat posed by a critical breakdown of the financial system. Slow growth and recurrent recessions without systemic financial disturbances, even the big recessions of 1975 and 1982, have not posed such a risk. The real danger comes from encouraging or inadvertently tolerating rising inflation and its close cousin of extreme speculation and risk taking, in effect standing by while bubbles and excesses threaten financial markets. Ironically, the ‘easy money,’ striving for a ‘little inflation’ as a means of forestalling deflation, could, in the end, be what brings it about. That is the basic lesson for monetary policy. It demands emphasis on price stability and prudent oversight of the financial system. Both of those requirements inexorably lead to the responsibilities of a central bank.”''

Of course, Volcker is cut from different cloth than his successors. Janet Yellen was only chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for four years and with good reason. She was arguably the most dovish Fed Chairmen in the history of the central bank, with a strong tendency to do too much rather than too little. Yellen confessed to the Financial Times last week that “I really thought we needed to pull every rabbit out of the hat.” And she did. An adherent of the state-intervention school championed by her Yale mentor James Tobin, Yellen has always followed the tendency of the left to support greater ease and tolerate higher levels of inflation. During her tenure as a Fed governor and then chairman, the Fed engaged in the purchase of trillions of dollars in government debt and mortgage securities through “quantitative easing” – a free loan to the Treasury that was couched as “stimulus. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) under Bernanke and Yellen also engaged in a deliberate manipulation of the term structure of interest rates via “Operation Twist,” a terrible mistake that has yet to be reversed. Operation twist caused untold damage to the financial markets and the US economy – damage that is still in process. In that interview with the FT, Yellen worries that the rhetorical attacks on the central bank by President Donald Trump is “whittling away the legitimacy and stature of institutions the public has traditionally had some confidence in. I feel it ultimately undermines social and economic stability.” She then goes on to say that “Trump has the potential to undermine confidence in the Fed.” Former Chairman Alan Greenspan, the most politically astute Fed chief in half a century, puts such worries in perspective: "I don't know a single President, and I worked for a lot of them, who don't want lower interest rates. Now, obviously that's not possible. You keep lowering them down to zero, where do you go from there?" Like Yellen, many observers worry that criticism of the Fed will make it difficult for the central bank to act when necessary. The dual, conflicted political mandate of full employment and price stability created by the Humphrey Hawkins law is not possible to achieve in practice, thus the FOMC lurches from one extreme to the other, causing enormous collateral damage.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-29/powell-prisoner-history-volcker-bashes-bernanke-yellen

Pence's little-noticed speech marked a new US realism toward China

A seismic shot across the bow, Vice President Mike Pence’s Oct. 4 speech on U.S.-China policy garnered surprisingly little coverage. But historians may well mark it as a significant turning point in great power relations. Pence’s address to the Hudson Institute heralded a dramatic shift in America’s approach to Beijing. He clearly and starkly announced that America is initiating a dramatic decoupling from a growing rival. There’s a strong economic basis for the shift. China’s rise has been funded in large part by excessive reliance on America’s consumers. The U.S. racks up trade deficits with China that amount to hundreds of billions annually. And this massive trade debt has already cost the U.S. 3.4 million jobs since 2001.

The issue now transcends jobs, though, and runs to national security concerns as well. In September, the Pentagon released a study on the troubling status of America’s defense industrial base, including multiple instances of dependence on China for key military hardware. The Defense Department expressed particular concern over “single points of failure,” with many remaining U.S. producers of critical defense materials on the verge of shutting down. The Pentagon notes that 90 percent of worldwide printed circuit board production is now located in Asia — predominantly in China. In contrast, America’s remaining printed circuit board production is failing to maintain state-of-the-art capability. In addition to electronics, the Pentagon has also cataloged U.S. dependency on China for such critical components as carbon fibers, solid rocket materials, machine tools, body armor, titanium, beryllium, and explosives. This should come as little surprise to keen observers of America’s defense industrial strength. And the Trump administration intimated as much last year in a National Security Strategy that highlighted the “erosion of American manufacturing” alongside other diverse challenges like rogue nations, porous borders, criminal cartels, and terror groups.

The Trump administration is the first to openly acknowledge China’s hostility, however. Where President Bill Clinton championed Beijing as a “partner,” and President Barack Obama accepted China as a strategic competitor, the Trump administration is now boldly declaring Beijing a national security threat. Earlier this year, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative offered a stern rebuke of the Clinton administration’s China policy, saying that the United States “erred” in supporting China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization, because “WTO rules are not sufficient to constrain China’s market-distorting behavior.” As Pence noted, China has used an arsenal of “tariffs, quotas, currency manipulation, forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and industrial subsidies” to bolster its manufacturing base at America’s expense.

More chilling, however, is Beijing’s wider global strategy. Pence said China is intent on controlling 90 percent of the world’s most advanced industries, including robotics, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. And Chinese security agencies have engaged in “wholesale theft of American technology.”

>>3661294

Sauce:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/pences-little-noticed-speech-marked-a-new-us-realism-toward-china

Fox News' Shepard Smith on caravan of migrants: ‘There is no invasion’

Fox News’ Shepard Smith dismissed the notion that a caravan of migrants headed to the U.S.-Mexico border were part of an “invasion,” pushing back against a term espoused by President Trump and others to describe the group. On his show Monday, Smith said the charged language surrounding the caravan has to do with the coming midterm elections and stressed that the urgency behind the warnings is overblown. He said Fox News forecasts the migrant group is more than two months away from arriving in the U.S. as of Tuesday, adding, “if any of them actually come here. “But tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is what all of this is about,” Smith said. “There is no invasion. No one’s coming to get you. There is nothing at all to worry about.”

The issue of the caravan has attracted some conspiracy theories, including one in which liberal billionaire George Soros and his foundation financially backed the caravan. The suspected gunman behind the deadly mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, Robert Bowers, had posted anti-Semitic content on social media and shared posts that referred to the migrants as a “third world caravan” and “invaders.”

President Trump has also used the term “invasion” to characterize the group of migrants as he warned they would not be accepted into the U.S. "Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border," Trump tweeted Monday. "Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!" The Trump administration announced Monday that 5,200 soldiers will be sent to fortify the U.S.-Mexican border ahead of the arrival of the caravan of migrants, which now includes more than 6,000 people.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fox-news-shepard-smith-on-caravan-of-migrants-there-is-no-invasion

U.S. government broadcaster to punish employees over George Soros report

The U.S. government’s international broadcasting agency says it will discipline employees responsible for a television report on philanthropist George Soros that violated its professional ethics and standards. The U.S. Agency for Global Mediasays that those who produced the report would be placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into “apparent misconduct” and may face disciplinary measures, including firing depending on the results of the probe.

The report on Soros aired in May on Spanish-language Radio Television Marti network, which broadcasts to Cuba. It described him as a “Jewish multi-millionaire” influencing nations through nongovernment groups. It quoted the conservative organization Judicial Watch as saying he was undermining democracies. Recently, Soros has been accused without evidence by right-wing commentators and politicians of funding migrants heading to the U.S. from Central America.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/29/george-soros-report-prompts-discipline-us-agency-g/

>>3661453

Yeah, he's the bobber alright!

>>3661455

Nothing to worry about, right!

>>3661474

Kek..I like this

>>3661483

>U.S. Agency for Global Media

Just pulled this off of their twitter feed.

Justice Department launches website to report hate crimes in wake of Pittsburgh fatal shooting

The Justice Department committed Monday to doing a better job of collecting data on hate crimes, moving in the wake of Saturday’s mass shooting that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said it’s clear many hate crimes are going unnoticed at the national level after reviewing data from 2016, when 88 percent of law enforcement agencies that report hate crimes to the FBI said they had zero such crimes that year. The department created a new “one-stop portal” website for local law enforcement and the public to report hate crimes to federal officials. It also offers resources such as training materials, research reports and statistics to help people combat hate crimes. “Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “Together we can find ways to improve reporting of hate crimes that will allow us to more effectively target our resources to where they are most needed.”

Some advocacy groups cheered the move as long overdue, saying they had been pushing for such a website for years. Experts, though, said that while more data can be helpful, it isn’t an effective tool against the type of violence that occurred Saturday when a gunman barged into Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Police have charged Robert Bowers, who appears to have a history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric on social media and allegedly told a police officer who took him into custody that he wanted to “kill all the Jews.”

“The idea of identifying hate mongers is not a bad idea, but it certainly is not going to do anything to stop the most serious cases like the high-profile, horrendous attacks we sometimes see in this country,” said Jack Levin, who specializes in hate crime research at Northeastern University. “And certainly not going to happen because of a website.” James Jacobs, who teaches criminal law at New York University, worried that the data collected and provided through the portal would end up politicizing hate crime statistics. “Instead of enhancing solidarity it just becomes a score card of which groups are most victimized,” he said.

Mr. Rosenstein said the website and a University of New Hampshire study of local law agencies’ reporting practices will help identify successful strategies to derail violence before it occurs. “The information generated should help us to develop more strategic and targeted approaches to prevent hate crimes,” he said.

But Mr. Levin said it’s tough to connect more reports on destroyed tombstones at Jewish cemeteries or spray-painted swastikas on a synagogue with efforts to deter someone determined to carry out the carnage like what occurred in Pittsburgh. Hate-crime reporting has been notoriously unreliable since the FBI began tracking the crimes in 1996.

The Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey says roughly 250,000 hate crimes occur in the U.S. annually, but the FBI’s 2016 hate crime report says that number is about 6,000. Local law enforcement is not required to report hate crime statistics to federal authorities, further undercutting the value of the federal numbers.

One of the issues, Mr. Levin said, is that people are often unsure what constitutes a hate crime. They are generally prejudice-motivated attacks on someone because of sex, ethnicity, disability, language, religion, nationality or sexual orientation, though there’s still a lot of gray area. For example, a North Carolina man murdered three Muslims near the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2015. Authorities insist the victims were murdered over a parking space, but families of the slain men insisted the crime was about their religion.

On Capitol Hill, three House Democrats called Monday for hearings into hate crimes and domestic terrorism. Reps. Jerrold Nadler of New York, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Steve Cohen of Tennessee want the House Judiciary Committee to discuss more than just the Pittsburgh murders. They said other crimes worthy of study are a Kentucky man who killed two black individuals in a supermarket last week after being denied entry into a predominately black church, and Cesar Altieri Sayoc, the man accused of sending pipe bombs to critics of President Trump. “It falls to us to begin the hard work of answering the questions left in the wake of this violence,” the Democrats wrote.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/29/doj-launches-website-to-report-hate-crimes-in-wake/

>>3661539

I believe this might be a black hat agency..just with a little bit of looking it certainly appears that way.

>>3661542

You have confirmed my suspicion, I guess a deeper dig might be in order here.

>>3661544

Maybe they should send him on the front lines there and see if he can take them back to his home… I wonder how long that would last. kek

>>3661637

I agree, but as we know (((they))) always intended to keep their boots on our necks…and push just a little harder everyday. (((they))) have their day of reckoning upon them.. Not too much longer Anon, hang tight..