If Fed Raises Interest Rates by 50 Basis Points, This Could Bring on True 'March Madness'
The same central bank that started the fire is being tasked with putting it out.
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Gerald Celente, the publisher of The Trends Journal who accurately forecast the Dot Com Bust and the Crash of 2008, said in his weekly “Trends in the News” YouTube broadcast that the Federal Reserve could slam the economy this month if it decides to raise the interest rate by 50 basis points.
BACKGROUND: The Federal Reserve is working to cool off inflation by hiking interest rates to slow the economy. Jay Powell, the head of the Fed, addressed Congress this week and showed a willingness to act aggressively to bring down inflation.
The Overnight Federal Funds Rate is 4.57 percent and could go as high as 6.5 percent. It is worth noting that the rate was at 0.08 percent last year. Recent news highlighting the economy’s continued strength is leading officials to think rates will need to be higher longer to reel inflation back to their 2-percent target.
TREND FORECAST: As we detailed in this week’s ECONOMIC UPDATE, and in scores of Trends Journal’s the equation is simple: The higher interest rates rise, the deeper equities and economies decline.
Facts don’t matter. And the facts have been extensively detailed in The Trends Journal for decades: The equity markets and economies are rigged. The Federal Reserve and most central banks are Bankster Bandits that do what they are told by governments-in-charge with the main objective—as proven by their deeds—to enrich the rich.
As we have long noted, both economies and equity markets have been artificially propped up with historically low interest rates, scams called “quantitative easing,” cheap money repo market injections, plunge protection teams, etc.
Then and Now
Tracking trends is an understanding of where we are, how we got here to see where we are going.
On 19 September 2018, the day before the S&P hit a record high, we had forecast an “Economic 9/11” would sink stock markets. We based our forecast on stated Federal Reserve policy to aggressively raise interest rates through 2019.
Perfectly on-trend, equity markets across the globe tanked, many sinking over 20 percent into bear territory following our forecast. In fact, the Dow had its worst December since the Great Depression.
Back then, mortgage refinance applications had hit an 18-year low in the U.S. following the Federal Reserve raised rates a mere .25 basis points in September. With rates at their highest point in eight years for mortgage refinances, volume was a whopping 40 percent down from a year earlier. Subsequently, shares of homebuilders stocks had slumped nearly 30 percent.
However, we did a 180-degree turn, reversing our “Economic 9/11” forecast to a “Trump Market Bump” following U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell’s rate hike U-turn on 4 January when he pledged to be “patient” in raising rates in 2019. Subsequently, by the end of April, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq rallied to record highs.
Immediately after the Fed signaled its high probability of no rate increase in 2019, central banks and governments began shooting new rounds of monetary methadone into their financial systems to help counter slowing economic growth by also lowering interest rates, implementing more quantitative easing provisions, lowering loan standards and/or spending on infrastructure projects.
More Bankster Fraud
Go back to September 2019, when the markets were in sink mode because the gamblers, (which The Street and media call “investors”) needed more cheap money to keep betting on the markets. Between September to January 2020, the Feds pumped in $7 trillion into the repo markets.
How about the long-forgotten scheme when the Panic of ’08 hit and the Feds injected $29 trillion into the Bankster Gangs to bail them out? Oh, and remember, children, they are above We the Plantation Workers of Slavelandia; they are “Too-Big-to Fail” and we are just pieces of disposable crap.
Better Late Than Never?
When the COVID War was launched by China in celebration of their Lunar New Year, the “Year of the Rat,” and the “Free World” followed the Chinese way, “You Must Obey,” by imposing draconian lockdown orders which have destroyed the lives and livelihoods of billions… the global economy and equity markets should have crashed.
Instead, they were both artificially propped up with record low interest rates and unprecedented government money pumping stimulus schemes, which, of course, is the foundation upon which sky-high inflation was built.
But again, while we had forecast that inflation would spike, the mainstream media ignored our trend forecasts and instead, as Presstitutes always do, the media whores put out for their corporate pimps and government whore masters.
Almost a year after the COVID War began, at his December 2020 press conference, Fed Head Jerome Powell pointed to “disinflationary pressures around the globe” and said “it’s not going to be easy to have inflation move up.”
A month later, with inflation on the move well above the Fed’s 2-percent target rate, Powell said it was only “temporary.”
In July, with inflation running at 5 percent, Powell told a Congressional committee that “we really do believe that these things will come down of their own accord as the economy reopens,” he noted.