EconomicCrisis.US

Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn believes that prices of mortgage-backed securities are likely to fall when the Fed eventually begins selling mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from its portfolio, according to a MarketNews International report by Steven K Beckner last Thursday.

The report continues: “He gave no indication when that might be. But Kohn, echoing earlier comments by New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley, said the Fed may well avoid any losses on its asset holdings, as well as on its liquidity facilities. ‘These programs may be unwound without loss,’ Kohn said, commenting from the audience at a Boston Federal Reserve Bank conference. He said the Fed entered the market ‘when prices were depressed by high premiums’ and so ‘the Fed could finance without risk.’ That in turn will mean they can be ‘unwound without loss.’”
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The United States may face a series of asset price bubbles and a rerun of the financial crisis unless it lets the dollar fall “at least” another 25 percent, economist Bernard Connolly said on Tuesday.

Because fierce international resistance will likely prevent such a large dollar devaluation, Connolly told Reuters the Federal Reserve may instead have to extend indefinitely its artificial support of a struggling U.S. economy by purchasing another $2 trillion in U.S. Treasuries and federal housing agency debt.

Some investors have started to watch Connolly’s forecasts. In February, he accurately predicted the Fed would have to buy Treasuries to boost the money supply and reduce borrowing costs for companies and households.
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Last autumn’s global financial crisis set off an economic earthquake. And we are still feeling the tremors. The latest sign of the ground shifting beneath our feet is our report today of plans by Gulf states, China, Russia, France and Japan to end their practice of conducting oil deals in US dollars, switching instead to a diverse basket of currencies.

It is not hard to see the motivation for oil exporters to move away from the dollar. The value of the US currency has fallen sharply since last year’s meltdown. And fears are growing, in the light of a spiralling US government deficit, that a further depreciation is likely. They do not want to sell their wares in return for a currency with an uncertain future.
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One of the reasons the global financial crisis took the world by surprise may be that our measurement system failed. That is, market participants and government officials were not focused on the right set of statistical indicators, claims a report from a panel of top economists led by Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen.

One of the main culprits, according to the research, which was commissioned by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, is that the classic and widely referenced gross domestic product metric is no longer a good measure of general well-being — and, in fact, has not been for some time
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