EconomicCrisis.US

Michael Snyder: The Federal Reserve says that everything is going to be okay.  The Fed says that unemployment is going to go down, inflation is going to remain low and economic growth is going to steadily increase.  Do you believe them this time?  As you will see later in this article, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been dead wrong about the economy over and over again.  But the mainstream media and many Americans still seem to have a lot of faith in the Federal Reserve.  It doesn’t seem to matter that Bernanke and other Fed officials have been telling the American people lies for years.  As I always say, most people believe what they want to believe, and many people seem to want to have blind faith in the Federal Reserve even when logic and reason would dictate otherwise.  The truth is that things are not going to be getting much better than they are right now.  When the next wave of the financial crisis hits, the U.S. economy is going to fall back into recession, financial markets are going to crash and unemployment is going to absolutely skyrocket.  But you will never hear any of that from the Federal Reserve.
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The dollar fell against most other major currencies Tuesday after U.S. consumer confidence slipped in April and home prices fell in February. Traders also bought the euro following strong demand at an auction for Spanish government debt.

The Conference Board said its Consumer Confidence Index was at 69.2 in April, down from 69.5 in March. Economists were expecting an increase to 70.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home-price index shows that home prices fell in February from January in 16 of the 20 cities it tracks. A sign that the housing market is still struggling to recover.
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Chairman Ben Bernanke says the U.S. job market remains weak despite three months of strong hiring and that the Federal Reserve’s existing policies will help boost growth.

Further job gains will likely require more robust consumer and business demand, Bernanke said Monday during a speech at the National Association for Business Economics spring conference in Arlington, Va.

Bernanke’s comments suggest the central bank is prepared to keep interest rates near zero for some time.

“Despite the recent improvement, the job market remains far from normal,” Bernanke said. “The number of people working and total hours worked are still significantly below pre-crisis peaks.”
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Markets are upping bets that the U.S. Federal Reserve will hike interest rates sooner than expected as the world’s biggest economy recovers, with U.S. rates seen rising faster than those in the crisis-hit euro zone.

A run of strong economic data has raised speculation that the Fed may need to look again at its commitment to keep interest rates low until the end of 2014.

“Obviously after the last (Federal Reserve) meeting we’ve had more and more market participants questioning whether the Fed will keep rates so low for so far out. That’s a reasonable question,” said Elwin de Groot, market economist at Rabobank.
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