Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen Speaking at University of Massachusetts-Amherst on September 24, 2015
Typically, the bond market would be closing at 2:00 p.m. today, leaving the stock market rudderless and thinly traded. Typically, tens of thousands of Wall Street traders would have nothing more taxing than visions of barbecues and beaches and beer dancing about in their heads and would be sprinting out of the office to the Hamptons or Fire Island or Montauk as soon as the bond market closes at 2 p.m. But today is not typical thanks to Scrooge Yellen who will be speaking around 1:15 p.m today. This fact is furrowing brows on Wall Street and forcing traders to hang around to see what market-moving nuggets might be dropped by the petite central banker in chief.
In reality, it’s Harvard that’s messing up the early holiday exodus on Wall Street. Harvard is giving Yellen the Radcliffe Medal for her “transformative impact on society.” (That likely means, “thank you Chair Yellen for using a melon scoop instead of an ice cream scoop to dish out rate hikes.”) Gregory Mankiw, an Economics Professor at Harvard, will interview Yellen on stage as part of the award presentation.
Hedge fund guys and high frequency traders have a nasty habit of hanging around to exploit market-moving news in thinly traded markets ahead of a holiday weekend. More market moving news came out at 8:30 a.m. this morning when the Commerce Department provided its second read on first quarter GDP, stating that it grew at a faster 0.8 percent annual rate versus its earlier calculation of 0.5 percent. Either of those numbers is bleak news for an economy that has been hovering at 2 percent GDP or lower since the Wall Street crash of 2008 and has effectively sentenced millions of job-seeking young adults and over-indebted college grads to be indefinitely bound to their parents’ homes for lack of an adequate income.
Yellen’s talk, limited though it may be, will follow “personal reflections” by former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, who immediately preceded Yellen as head of the Federal Reserve.
The comments from the current and former U.S. central bankers come just one day after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stunned economists worldwide with an article in its flagship magazine under the title: “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” which appeared to be hurling an insult directly at the U.S.
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