When the Federal Reserve leans on the cosmic dimmer switch labeled “Interest Rates,” the whole planet feels the lights flicker. From a balcony overlooking Istanbul’s Golden Horn, you can practically hear the groan of 1.3 billion mortgage holders on three continents, all suddenly recalculating whether the extra bedroom is still worth the existential dread. Yes,…
**When the World Holds Its Breath: The Global Theater of Today’s Fed Meeting** If you’re asking what time the Fed meeting starts today, congratulations—you’ve joined billions of people whose lives hang in the balance of eight bureaucrats arguing about numbers in a Washington conference room. The answer, for those keeping score, is 2:00 PM Eastern…
Jerome Powell took the podium this week like a man asked to defuse a bomb while everyone else in the room argues over the color of the wires. The Federal Reserve—America’s monetary Death Star—kept rates unchanged at 5.25–5.50%, thereby disappointing bulls, bears, prophets, doom-scrollers, and at least three hedge-fund managers who had already priced in…
Lisa Cook: How One American Economist Became the World’s Accidental Moral Barometer By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic (Wi-Fi permitting) It began, as most modern morality plays do, on Twitter. When the U.S. Senate confirmed Lisa Cook—previously a quiet Michigan State professor who once compared recessions to bad dates (painful, inevitable, rarely the other…
**The World Holds Its Breath While Washington Plays Interest Rate Roulette** As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell emerges from the marble temple of American monetary policy this week, global markets will be watching with the same nervous anticipation usually reserved for North Korean missile launches or Elon Musk’s Twitter feed. The September Fed meeting—essentially the…
The Fed Waves a Red Flag and Calls It a Victory Parade By Helena de la Cruz, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Washington, D.C. – If you listen very carefully at 2 a.m. in Singapore, you can almost hear the champagne corks popping inside the Eccles Building. The Federal Reserve has, at long last, delivered the…
PNC FirstBank Holding: When Two American Mid-Tier Banks Decide to Tango, the World Hums Along—Barely By the time the press release landed in inboxes from Singapore to São Paulo, most global investors had already yawned, refilled their cortados, and returned to the far more pressing question of whether China will actually invade Taiwan before lunch….
The ADP National Employment Report dropped this morning like an overpriced latte on a marble trading-floor desk: briefly scalding, quickly mopped up, and instantly debated by people whose bonuses depend on pretending to know what it means. According to America’s largest private-payroll processor, U.S. private employers added a breezy 192,000 jobs in April—comfortably above the…
