Commentary If you’re looking for a spirited argument in favor of preserving and perpetuating the independence of a central bank from political pressures and the whims of the mob, you won’t find better than the words of none other than Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “Long experience, in the United States and in other advanced…

Commentary New jobs created printed at 236,000 on April 7, according to the Establishment Survey, on par with market expectations of 230,000 jobs. The Household Survey printed lower, at 160,000. Net revisions were down 17,000 from January and February. Both the unemployment rate, at 3.5 percent, and the number of unemployed persons, at 5.8 million,…

Commentary Fed-speak, Alan Greenspan once explained, was about practicing the art of constructive ambiguity. Testifying to Congress as Fed chairman, Greenspan would resolve a sentence in a deliberately obscure way that made it incomprehensible, “but nobody was quite sure I wasn’t saying something profound when I wasn’t.” Speaking on Tuesday at a symposium on central bank independence…

Commentary Markets trimmed over 3 percent by Friday’s close after Federal Reserve Chairman Powell offered up a stark eight-minute soliloquy telling Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe” to straighten up, fast, because the Fed was not going to refill the punch bowl. I said in my July jobs report that the prognostications of the stock peddlers-cum-“analysts”…

Despite calls for a tighter monetary policy to fight high inflation, Federal Reserve policymakers have yet to commit to the size of the next rate increase at its policy meeting in September, said Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. It also remains far from clear whether the easing of U.S. inflation…