In predicting the major stock, bond, commodity, and foreign exchange markets around the world, nothing is more important than to anticipate the actions of the Federal Reserve System's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets the course of monetary policy in the United States. By controlling the key interest rate in the money markets and other monetary variables, the FOMC has an enormous impact on the global economy and financial markets.Watching the Fed closely are not only Wall Street's economists and investment strategists but also reporters and commentators at the major financial news organizations. In fact, anyone involved in investment matters and business activities anywhere in the world needs to watch the Fed, because its policies have powerful impacts not only on the US economy but also on the global economy.For participants in the financial markets, anticipating a policy change by the Fed and positioning an investment portfolio or speculative trade accordingly can result in big gains. Conversely, failing to anticipate a move by the Fed can result in big losses or missed opportunities for gains.In this unique primer, Dr. Edward Yardeni, one of the world's most experienced and widely followed "Fed watchers," helps investors to understand the FOMC's decision-making process, anticipate its moves, and profit from those insights.

There has been much confusion about corporate profits. As a result, there has been lots of sloppy analysis and misinformed discussion of such important issues as the central role of profits in economic growth, the trend of profits, the corporate tax rate, the profit margin, profits' share of national income, and corporate share buybacks.The confusion has played into the hands of progressives, who claim that the profit motive results in income and wealth inequality. As I will show in this study, their narrative of the relationship between profits and prosperity is wrong and misleadingly pessimistic. Market-driven profit is the source of widespread prosperity, not its nemesis.

I started my career on Wall Street in 1978. For the past 40 years on the Street, I have been thinking and writing about the economy and financial markets as both an economist and an investment strategist. While I have a solid academic background to be a Wall Street prognosticator, I learned a great deal on the job. In this book, I share my professional insights into predicting the economy and financial markets.

A Federal Reserve insider pulls back the curtain on the secretive institution that controls America’s economy After correctly predicting the housing crash of 2008 and quitting her high-ranking Wall Street job, Danielle DiMartino Booth was surprised to find herself recruited as an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, one of the regional centers of our complicated and widely misunderstood Federal Reserve System. She was shocked to discover just how much tunnel vision, arrogance, liberal dogma, and abuse of power drove the core policies of the Fed. DiMartino Booth found a cabal of unelected academics who made decisions without the slightest understanding of the real world, just a slavish devo­tion to their theoretical models. Over the next nine years, she and her boss, Richard Fisher, tried to speak up about the dangers of Fed policies such as quanti­tative easing and deeply depressed interest rates. But as she puts it, “In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand that the Fed was simply too big to fight.” Now DiMartino Booth explains what really happened to our economy after the fateful date of December 8, 2008, when the Federal Open Market Committee approved a grand and unprecedented ex­periment: lowering interest rates to zero and flooding America with easy money. As she feared, millions of individuals, small businesses, and major corporations made rational choices that didn’t line up with the Fed’s “wealth effect” models. The result: eight years and counting of a sluggish “recovery” that barely feels like a recovery at all. While easy money has kept Wall Street and the wealthy afloat and thriving, Main Street isn’t doing so well. Nearly half of men eighteen to thirty-four live with their parents, the highest level since the end of the Great Depression. Incomes are barely increasing for anyone not in the top ten percent of earners. And for those approaching or already in retirement, extremely low interest rates have caused their savings to stagnate. Millions have been left vulnerable and afraid. Perhaps worst of all, when the next financial crisis arrives, the Fed will have no tools left for managing the panic that ensues. And then what? DiMartino Booth pulls no punches in this exposé of the officials who run the Fed and the toxic culture they created. She blends her firsthand experiences with what she’s learned from dozens of high-powered market players, reams of financial data, and Fed docu­ments such as transcripts of FOMC meetings. Whether you’ve been suspicious of the Fed for decades or barely know anything about it, as DiMartino Booth writes, “Every American must understand this extraordinarily powerful institution and how it affects his or her everyday life, and fight back.”

Several Progressive politicians have pounced on corporate share buybacks lately. They see buybacks as a major source of income and wealth inequality, subpar capital spending, and lackluster productivity. In their opinion, buybacks have contributed greatly to the stagnation of the standards of living of most Americans in recent years. So they want to limit buybacks or even ban them. Some of Wall Street's stock-market bears have been growling about buybacks as well. They've been arguing that buybacks have rigged the stock market in favor of the bulls. They claim that companies buy back their stock to boost their share prices, using debt to finance this dubious activity. As a result, corporate balance sheets have become increasingly leveraged, which makes them vulnerable to a recession. Widespread corporate leverage, in turn, would exacerbate any economic downturn. The bears therefore remain bearish and expect to be vindicated with a vengeance, eventually. In this study, Edward Yardeni and Joseph Abbott show that the facts don't support either narrative. The most common reason that S&P 500 companies buy back their shares is to offset the dilution in the number of shares outstanding that results when employee compensation takes the form of stock options and stock grants that vest over time, not just for top executives but for many employees. In effect, the ultimate source of funds for most stock buybacks is the employee compensation expense item on corporate income statements, not bond issuance as the bears contend. The authors explain that the bull market in stocks has boosted buybacks to a greater extent than buybacks have boosted the market, whereas the opposite is more widely believed. Rising stock prices increase the attractiveness of paying some of employees' compensation with stock grants. Buybacks then are necessary to offset the dilution of earnings per share. While the latest bull market, like previous ones, has been driven by rising earnings, it's a Wall Street legend that earnings per share have been boosted artificially and significantly by stock buybacks. It may seem that way only because what lift buybacks have provided to stock prices is highly visible, occurring in the open market, whereas companies' need to offset stock issuance with stock repurchases is less apparent. The authors also refute Progressives' pervasive narrative that most Americans' standards of living have stagnated in recent decades and that buybacks per se have worsened income inequality.

The New York Times bestseller from business journalist Christopher Leonard infiltrates one of America’s most mysterious institutions—the Federal Reserve—to show how its policies spearheaded by Chairman Jerome Powell over the past ten years have accelerated income inequality and put our country’s economic stability at risk. If you asked most people what forces led to today’s unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press. When the economy grew, it was credited to the Fed. When the economy imploded in 2008, the Fed got credit for rescuing us. But here, for the first time, is the inside story of how the Fed has reshaped the American economy for the worse. It all started on November 3, 2010, when the Fed began a radical intervention called quantitative easing. In just a few short years, the Fed more than quadrupled the money supply with one goal: to encourage banks and other investors to extend more risky debt. Leaders at the Fed knew that they were undertaking a bold experiment that would produce few real jobs, with long-term risks that were hard to measure. But the Fed proceeded anyway…and then found itself trapped. Once it printed all that money, there was no way to withdraw it from circulation. The Fed tried several times, only to see the market start to crash, at which point the Fed turned the money spigot back on. That’s what it did when COVID hit, printing 300 years’ worth of money in a few short months. Which brings us to now: Ten years on, the gap between the rich and poor has grown dramatically, inflation is raging, and the stock market is driven by boom, busts, and bailouts. Middle-class Americans seem stuck in a stage of permanent stagnation, with wage gains wiped out by high prices even as they remain buried under credit card debt, car loan debt, and student debt. Meanwhile, the “too big to fail” banks remain bigger and more powerful than ever while the richest Americans enjoy the gains of a hyper-charged financial system. The Lords of Easy Money “skillfully” (The Wall Street Journal) tells the “fascinating” (The New York Times) tale of how quantitative easing is imperiling the American economy through the story of the one man who tried to warn us. This is the first inside story of how we really got here—and why our economy rests on such unstable ground.

Fed Up! tells the story of a global macro trader working amidst the greatest market panic we have seen since the Great Depression. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the world, readers are taken through the late-stage decadence of an exuberant market bubble to the depths of the market crash and into the early innings of a recovery. It provides readers with a front row seat on trading activity, allowing them to experience the heartbeat of the markets. It’s also about money and opportunity. It’s about the moral dilemma of a man who is struggling as he reaches his own peak. Readers will experience the frenetic pace of life as a trader and will connect with the protagonist, experiencing his struggle to balance his personal values with the compromised values of the world around him. It shines a light on the largest policy issues confronting the U.S., while offering an entertaining and humorous look at the guys and gals who are the new market operators. This riveting account of the 2020 market crash from inside the mind of a global macro trader will serve as an exciting, nail-biting record of current times. It is about making fortunes while the world slips into misfortune. Will he beat the markets or will the markets beat him?

#1 New York Times Bestseller “Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving.” —The New York Times Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals. In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success. In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve. Here, from a man who has been called both “the Steve Jobs of investing” and “the philosopher king of the financial universe” (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.

A proven production model is described, which is capable of producing an income from a small acreage of equal or superior to that of off-farm jobs.