This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, January 4, 2019: 

If you stop Trump’s economy, you stop Trump. This is more and more clearly the policy of the Federal Reserve under its temporary head, Jerome Powell. Temporary because the Fed, now more than 100 years old, is the bastard child of the international banking establishment and its authority is granted only temporarily to its chairman.

The Fed’s job is to slow the Trump economy to the point where it becomes a liability for his reelection campaign in 2020 instead of an asset. How do we know this? In Powell’s Q and A following the announcement that the central bank was raising interest rates by another 25 basis points on December 19, he was asked a question about the “runoff” of bonds that it has been engaging in for months now, sucking capital out of the financial markets. Asked Heather Long of the Washington Post: “I’m wondering if the Fed has had any discussion of altering the course of the balance sheet normalization and if you could give us any thoughts on what might lead the FOMC to alter that balance sheet normalization in 2019?”

Responded Powell:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, January 4, 2018: 

The jobs report issued by the Department of Labor on Friday was unequivocally positive. Every sector of the economy, save one, saw robust gains in employment, with 312,000 new jobs created in December beating forecasters’ predictions by 30,000 jobs. In addition, the DOL revised October’s and November’s numbers upward by 58,000 jobs. Even the rise in the unemployment rate from a record low of 3.7 percent to 3.9 percent was explained by the number of new people entering the job market.

The number of unemployed workers dropped by 300,000 over the last 12 months, while the labor participation rate jumped. Wages improved as well

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, January 3, 2019:  

A month ago, bond investors were predicting that the Fed would be raising interest rates several times in 2019. As the economy is now clearly slowing, those same investors are predicting the Fed has now done its job and won’t be raising rates in the New Year. Said the Wall Street Journal:

Fed-funds futures, which investors use to bet on the direction of Fed policy, on Wednesday showed a 91% probability that the central bank’s policy makers will finish the year [2019] with interest rates at or below their current levels.

 

That is a reversal from early November, when futures prices indicated a 90% probability that rates would end 2019 higher than they are now.

The latest report from the Institute of Supply Management merely confirmed that slowing economy, with its manufacturing survey published on Thursday coming in below forecasters’ expectations (which were below October’s).

The New American has been tracking and noting the slowing of the U.S. economy that has been established policy at the Fed for many months now. In November we noted that