Inflation in the U.S. is at a 30 year high, and many Americans have noticed a cost increase in the items that they purchase every day. Last month, President Biden renominated Jerome Powell to a second term as Federal Reserve chair and combating inflation will be Powell’s top priority entering this term, or at least the priority that people care about the most. There are several levers that the Fed can pull to attempt to combat this inflation. As Powell announced last month, quantitative easing is the lever that they plan to pull right now. Quantitative easing, or QE, is a Fed program that purchases financial assets from the market in order to get more cash into the American economic system.…
Posts published in “Finance”
Lately, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding business development companies and people’s preference toward them as opposed to investment banks. Business development companies are essentially publicly traded closed-end funds that provide capital appreciation and income. BDCs give smaller companies the capital they need for growth. They are independent and answer to their own board of directors. BDCs are a combination of an investment company and an operating company that provide financing to small- and mid-sized businesses.
Small to mid-sized businesses prefer BDCs to investment banks because investment banks are highly regulated by the Federal Reserve. BDCs represent a transparent portfolio of loans that can be traded publicly with little to no regulation.…
This year, it looks like there’ll be one uninvited guest at your house for the holidays: inflation. The coming holiday season will be one of the most expensive on record given the rising costs of food (a 5.3% gain since last year) and a higher Consumer Price Index (a 6.2% rise since last year). The CPI reached a 30-year high in October, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rising inflation might cause the Federal Reserve to continue its policy course. However, according to experts, these bumps are all very normal as the economy gets back up and running.
Supply chain issues continue to be a problem as well.…
In the last article from this series in June 2020, I spoke about the impending doom of rising interest rates. I mentioned how this would be precipitated by additional federal government stimulus legislation and the need for the U.S. Treasury to issue more debt to fund so much new federal spending. For once I was right. The yield curve did steepen back in June. Specifically, most of the steepening occurred primarily on the 20-year point due to the new treasury issuance with that same maturity, the rest of the curve was relatively unchanged from the 0-10-year points. As a quick refresher, since the yield curve represents expected future interest rates, it also indicates growth expectations for the general economy. …
On Friday March 5, NYU Stern’s Fubon Center for Technology, Business, and Innovation hosted Stern’s fourth annual Fintech Conference via a Virtual Zoom Webinar. The conference theme was “No Borders, No Barriers,” highlighting that technology has no passport. In line with that theme, the event featured an international slate of speakers from several countries, including the United States, Israel, India, Argentina, United Kingdom, California, and the Netherlands.
The conference was once again a smashing success with 1,200 registrants signing up for the virtual format, bringing together “top fintech scholars, forward-looking financial institutions, innovative fintech startups, and leading fintech investors” in the words of Kathleen DeRose, Director of the Fubon Fintech Initiative and Clinical Associate Professor of Finance at Stern. …