Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel says Jerome Powell is making one of the biggest policy mistakes in the Fed’s 110-year history, and it could lead to a major recession

Link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wharton-professor-jeremy-siegel-says-191800487.html

Excerpt:

The Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel has a big issue with the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest-rate hikes in its bid to tame inflation, and he’s worried that the central bank is making the biggest mistake in its history and may provoke a steep recession.

Siegel said inflation is starting to come down significantly, but the Fed is still moving forward with its rate hikes.

He said it could be “one of the biggest policy mistakes in the 110-year history of the Fed, by staying so easy when everything was booming.”

…..

“I think the Fed is just way too tight. They’re making exactly the same mistake on the other side that they made a year ago,” Siegel added.

To Siegel’s point, the Fed has had a lousy record of accurately forecasting where it expects interest rates to be just a few months into the future.

….

“I am very upset. It’s like a pendulum. They were way too easy through 2020 and 2021, and now ‘we’re going to be real tough guys until we crush the economy,'” Siegel said of the Fed.

Siegel expects the Fed to “eventually see the light” as none of their recent predictions are likely to come true.

“I think they’re going to be forced to lower the rates much more rapidly than they think,” Siegel said, a move that could set up stocks for a potential recovery from their ongoing decline.

Author(s): Matthew Fox

Publication Date: 25 Sept 2022

Publication Site: Yahoo Finance

Semi-annual time changes are a pointless, disruptive, and expensive annual ritual

Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/semi-annual-time-changes-are-a-pointless-disruptive-and-expensive-2021-3

Excerpt:

And this is why our semi-annual time changes need to end. It disrupts coordination, which is the whole point of keeping time. Most of the world does not observe DST. And countries that do adopt it do so on different days. 

This means for a few weeks each year there is total time chaos. People on the East Coast can’t remember if Europe is five or six hours ahead anymore. It wreaks havoc on the airline industry, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in non-pandemic times. JP Morgan estimates consumer spending drops 3.5% every year we return to Standard Time. There are also more heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, and depression. 

And for what benefit? None I can think of. 

Author(s): Allison Schrager

Publication Date: 13 March 2021

Publication Site: Business Insider