U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said yesterday (Tuesday) that the worst recession since the Great Depression is “very likely over.” However, Bernanke also said that unemployment would remain high and keep the recovery from accelerating.

“Even though, from a technical perspective, the recession is very likely over at this point,” Bernanke said, “it’s still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time, as many people still find that their job security and their employment status is not what they wish it was. So that is a challenge for us and all policy-makers going forward.”

The real challenge for Fed policymakers will be to gingerly dismantle all of the programs they set in place to backstop the markets – such as the Commercial Paper Funding Facility – which holds $109.2 billion in short-term IOUs issued by corporations – and the Term Asset-Backed Securities

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[Editor's Note: If it's inflation you're worried about - and commodities you want to invest in - there's no better place to look than the Global Resource Alert trading service, which ferrets out companies poised to profit from the so-called “Secular Bull Market” in commodities. If you’re new to the commodities-investing arena, and are uncertain about the landscape – or even if you’re an “old hand” at natural-resource stocks, but want some insights into the new profit plays and new players – consider hiring a guide: Money Morning Contributing EditorPeter Krauth, a recognized expert in metals, mining and energy stocks, who is also the editor of the Global Resource Alert. A former portfolio advisor, Krauth continues to work out of resource-rich Canada, which keeps him close to most of the companies he researches. Against the growing global financial malaise, Krauth says that commodities are among …

With the global economy on the mend, could gold be gearing up for another record-setting run? It sure looks that way. 

After peaking north of the $1,000 per ounce price level last year, gold hit a stumbling block when deflationary fears in the world’s largest economy sucked the air out of commodities prices and sent hoards of investors stampeding into the safe-haven of U.S. Treasuries, and helped spawn a rebound in the U.S. dollar.

Since that time, the global economic outlook - especially beyond U.S. borders - has improved, and gold prices have stabilized.

The next step - many gold bulls say - is for the yellow metal to make a run for new highs.

Whipsaw Trading Patterns

Gold started 2009 at about $870 an ounce - down substantially from early 2008 when prices hit a record-high $1033.90, but significantly higher than the $712.30 an ounce it was trading at in mid-November.

Then, when talk of inflation

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[Editor's Note: If you're new to the commodities-investing arena, and are uncertain about the landscape - or even if you're an "old hand" at natural-resource stocks, but want some insights into the new profit plays and new players - consider hiring a guide: Money Morning Contributing Editor Peter Krauth, a recognized expert in metals, mining and energy stocks, is also the editor of the Global Resource Alert trading service, which ferrets out companies poised to profit from the so-called “Secular Bull Market” in commodities. A former portfolio advisor, Krauth continues to work out of resource-rich Canada, which keeps him close to most of the companies he researches. Against the growing global financial malaise, Krauth says that commodities are among the most-profitable and least-risky investments available, and notes that this may well be the most powerful bull market for commodities we’ll see in our lifetimes. He …

Lots of transactions went on in central banking over the past month or so, not only in the United States but in the UK and Europe. Quantitative easing is the game and, at least, the central bankers are getting more and more comfortable with this.

Credit is given to quantitative easing for the drop in the dollar LIBOR rate. The three month LIBOR now ranges between 50 and 60 basis points over the target Federal Funds rate chosen by the Federal Reserve. This is the lowest this spread has been in a long time. For the five years previous to September 2008, the time the financial markets collapsed, this spread averaged between 20 and 30 basis points.

This move reflects the efforts of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank to push short term interest rates lower and to engage in monetary actions that

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Over the weekend, I was working on my long delayed manuscript on exchange rate modeling [0], and pondering how useful the conventional econometric techniques were for making predictions about the future value of the dollar.

Figure 1: Log value of trade weighted dollar, against a basket of major currencies (blue), and against a broad basket of currencies (red); and Deutsche Bank forecasts, calculated using implied changes of DB TWI (dark blue boxes). NBER defined recession shaded gray; only peak indicated for current recession. Source: Federal Reserve via FRED II, Deutsche Bank Exchange Rate Perspectives (27 March 2009), NBER, and author's calculations.

Why wonder? Well, in the final chapter of the text, I outlined the use of Taylor rule fundamentals to explain exchange rates (see this paper and these posts [1], [2], [3]). However, the fact that several central banks have hit the

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My previous post reviewed the profound changes in the balance sheet of the U.S. Federal Reserve over the last 18 months. Here I comment on some of the concerns that the new Fed balance sheet raises for the conduct of monetary policy.

I would suggest first that the new Fed balance sheet represents a fundamental transformation of the role of the central bank. The whole idea behind open market operations is to make the process of creating new money completely separate from the decision of who receives any fiscal transfers. In a traditional open market operation, the Fed buys or sells an existing Treasury obligation for the same price anyone else would pay for the security. As a result, the operation itself does not involve any net transfer of wealth between the Fed and the private sector. The philosophy is that the Fed should base

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A lot of people have seen this picture of the recent behavior of the monetary base and wondered what it means.

Figure 1. Adjusted monetary base. Source: FRED.

To understand the explosion in the monetary base since September, let's begin with a little background. The Federal Reserve has the ability to purchase assets or make loans with funds (money) that are created by the Fed itself. To buy a billion dollars worth of assets, the Fed doesn't show up with new cash in a wheelbarrow. Instead the Fed pays for any assets it purchases or loans it extends by crediting the funds that the recipient bank has in an account with the Fed, known as reserve deposits. A bank can later withdraw those deposits in the form of green currency, if it chooses, and that's the point

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div align=”justify”I noted in this week’s podcast that credit markets were healing steadily after last Autumn’s carnage, and bond issuance has picked up sharply in recent weeks. As a reflection of that trend, emstrongit is notable that after the huge ballooning of the Fed balance sheet in the last few months of 2008, several categories of Fed assets have actually declined in recent weeks/strong/em. The really large changes have been in currency swaps and the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) as shown in the bottom chart below. Swaps are dollars provided to foreign central banks to help satisfy dollar-based liquidity needs in foreign financial markets (recall there was a crisis shortage of dollars back in Sept/Oct as corporates in emerging markets sought to roll-over short-term debt). The CPFF is a Federal Reserve funding facility set up to boost liquidity in the domestic commercial paper markets, and as shown in the …

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /While we are likely to see a "substantial'' drop in euro-region inflation, Bank of Spain forecasts for the 15-nation euro area do not show price drops. That is they "show an enormous moderation in price gains, but they do show price gains,'' according to the latest statements by Miquel Angel Fernandez Ordoñez, ECB Council member and Governor of the Bank of Spain. Bank of Spain eurozone forecasts "don't show deflation" he told reporters in Madrid yesterday (Wednesday).br /br /The reason for this swift and adroit response to the question of the day in Spain was that EU Economy and Finance Commissioner Joaquin Almunia (not exactly your garden-variety world authority on macroeconomic topics) had earier said that the Europe's economies were "facing the prospect of deflation" amidst the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. In fact Fernandez Ordoñez is right, as is his want - right ...