Of course this has a couple of meanings, but we are mainly referring to the Fed’s balance sheet, (BS). It is Thursday, so the Fed has updated their BS figures and we now stand at $6.9 trillion! This is up some $200 billion for the week and is unfortunately not shocking. Also, since it is Thursday, we received the initial jobless claims for the prior week and sadly, another 3 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance. This takes us to nearly 36 million Americans losing their jobs over the last two months. Certainly, some of these jobs will be returning and some of them have. But it would be prudent to be mindful that some of these jobs may have “come back” due to SBA loans that require employers to bring back their employees and place them all on payroll – a condition to make the loan(s) forgivable. So it’s quite possible that even though people are back on payroll, it does not necessarily mean that they are in fact working. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months of economic data releases.
A brief follow up to yesterday’s podcast, “Negative Rates Are Coming,” we wanted to highlight a point we did not mention in our discussion and that pertains to Jay Powell making reference to “putting away” all of their tools once the crisis is over. Oh, really? Didn’t former Fed Chair, Ben Bernanke, say the same thing in relation to QE during the GFC? Yes, yes he did. So again, we do not trust these central bankers to hold the line, get tough with Congress, buck what the markets want, or much anything else for that matter. That is why it’s only a matter of time before negative rates are here.
And then lastly, we discuss a couple of cases that were before the US Supreme Court where they heard arguments pertaining to the release of the President’s tax returns and other financial papers. The lower courts for both cases ruled that these papers needed to be turned over to Congress and to a DA’s office out of the state of New York. The President obviously appealed these lower court decisions and it is now in the hands of the Supreme Court Justices and they will likely render a verdict sometime this summer – right in the heat of the 2020 Presidential election race. Stay diversified, stay vigilant, and stay with The Kapital News. #Economy #Jobs #Debt #Bailouts #USA #EndTheFed #Recession #Depression #Protests #Gold