As the world recovers slowly from the Great Recession of 2008, employment has lagged, particularly youth and new graduate employment. Why is this? Employing new graduates and the young is a longer term investment involving money, time and resources towards future productivity. Employing older, experienced workers is an investment in current productivity. Any future productivity

Nothing happens without enterprise. Nothing happens without labor. There is at least the perception, that in the past few decades, and certainly accelerating into the past few years, enterprise has had the upper hand. 3 decades of falling interest rates have certainly helped enterprise through cheap funding while returns to savers have steadily diminished but

The market will be awaiting Bernanke’s pronouncements this Wednesday in his monetary policy report to Congress. Ben will likely have prepared two speeches, one hawkish and the other dovish. Almost a month ago Bernanke telegraphed the Fed’s intention to eventually taper off QE. Since then the Fed has prevaricated and indicated that monetary policy would

The risk that faces the Fed today is that it will not be able to taper of its asset purchase program. All indicators point to a sustainable, albeit weak recovery. It is only reasonable that if this were true, the Fed would at some stage be well advised to reduce its balance sheet, if nothing

As expected the Fed is prevaricating over its plan to slow the pace of QE. The Fed was always going to telegraph its intentions well in advance and to prevaricate publicly until the market was weaned off the idea of perpetual QE before they actually taper it off.