Sorry to hear that PF. Good luck to you. Yes, I'm gambling some. This post isn't traditional. Its supposed to be thought provoking for someone that maybe didn't know some of this was going on. Maybe Im down a rabbit hole though. Its hard for me to tell sometimes. (this was supposed to be an open discussion for someone to debate with to prove me wrong.)

It seems they need buyers of US debt and that those interest rates are going up.

"Yields on U.S. government debt (Treasuries) have been pushing upward due to concerns over high budget deficits, inflation pressures, and surging global debt supply. For example, the 10-year Treasury yield is hovering over 4.4%, and recent auctions of long-term notes and bonds have drawn higher rates as the market demands more yield to absorb the massive volume of new borrowing."

"If you bought a $300,000 20-year bond at a 5% annual growth rate with all interest compounding, your total amount would grow to $795,989.31 under annual compounding, or $805,519.15 if using the standard semiannual compounding frequency typical of U.S. Treasury bonds."

"If you buy U.S. government debt right now, you will earn interest rates ranging from roughly 3.7% to 5.1%, depending on the type of security and its maturity date.The current interest rates (yields) for standard marketable U.S. Treasury securities are:Treasury Bills (Short-Term): Yields range from about 3.7% to 4.2% for maturities spanning 1 month to 1 year.Treasury Notes (Medium-Term): Yields sit between 4.2% and 4.6% for 2-year to 10-year notes.Treasury Bonds (Long-Term): 20-year and 30-year bonds are paying approximately 5.0% to 5.1%."

At one time this was considered the safest investment. Hopefully it still is and hopefully a guaranteed 5% is enough to help you in some way.

Im sure you've talked to a professional. Don't listen to anything on here. This strategy involves losing money here and there not constant growth. Speculation is probably exactly what its called but I like to think of it as strategic speculation... I haven't lost enough to learn my lesson yet where you may be in a situation that doesn't allow you to absorb those blows. Hope everything works out for you.

When I sell a stock today, that stock will sell, and the money wont go into my account for me to buy another stock until Monday. "waiting for the money to clear / settle". If people start using crypto does that transaction start taking less than a second?

Anyway. Interesting times.

Oh maybe that was a bad example then. This stuff is all trading in a brokerage link account for me through fidelity. I rolled a 401k account into it and am trading pure stocks with it now instead of just having their 401k funds to chose.

(a rule they changed so people like us were able to do things like this.)

How long is this sustainable?

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/economy/policy/articles/u-treasury-borrowed-155-billion-103613516.html

How long is this sustainable?

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/economy/policy/articles/u-treasury-borrowed-155-billion-103613516.html

Anyway thats what I have been watching has been saying. I wonder why warsh isn't contributing to the dot pot, isnt doing forecasts anymore, and what happens when all that changes at once with everything thats going on? Beats me.

Kevin Warsh presides over his first Federal Open Market Committee meeting as Federal Reserve chairman this week, and his eventual reform list is long. Reduce the balance sheet, review the Keynesian bias in its economic models, keep the Fed out of fiscal policy, and more. But his first priority, and an important one, is likely to be overhauling the way the Fed communicates.

Few innovations since 2008 have been as counterproductive as the adoption of “forward guidance” as a policy tool. Fed officials came to believe that by giving investors a heads-up on the central bank’s intentions for short-term interest rates, it can steer longer-term rates and the economy as well.

But the constant yammering—long policy statements, press conferences after every FOMC meeting, nonstop speeches by Fed officials and above all the quarterly Summary of Economic Projections—has exposed how little the Fed understands about the economy and trapped officials in errant policies.

***
It’s hard to remember when the Fed wasn’t this talkative. Yet until the 1990s the central bank cultivated an air of inscrutability. Officials didn’t even release announcements when they adjusted their overnight policy interest rate. The Fed played down its periodic publication of limited economic forecasts, which investors generally ignored.

Officials gradually started publishing statements of policy decisions after 1994. A fuller explanation of the FOMC’s reasoning arrived under Alan Greenspan in 1999, when officials began explaining what came to be known as the “balance of risks”—whether they thought tightening or easing was likely to be more appropriate in the future.

The oversharing went into overdrive after 2008. After cutting rates to near zero and ramping up quantitative easing, Ben Bernanke lit on communication as a policy tool in its own right.

Mr. Bernanke was eager to persuade investors that he’d keep rates low for an extended period. Hence the adoption of an explicit 2% inflation target in 2012, to reassure investors that the Fed wouldn’t tighten if inflation was below that level. In late 2007 the Fed had published the first iteration of what would eventually become the quarterly projections. The infamous “dot plots” depicting FOMC officials’ anonymous guesses about future interest-rate moves appeared in early 2012.

In 2011 Mr. Bernanke began holding press conferences after some FOMC meetings, and the gabfests became a fixture after every meeting in 2019 under Jerome Powell. Along the way, Fed officials began delivering more and more speeches between meetings. Investors and journalists scrutinize these orations for clues about future policies.

This has been good for journalists but not for the Fed. Its quarterly projections are notorious for predictions about GDP growth, unemployment and inflation that turn out to be wrong.

The Fed’s sages badly overestimated economic growth in 2011 and 2012, predicting about 3% in December of the previous years when the economy grew only 1.5%. But then it underestimated growth in 2017 and 2019 as it failed to appreciate the impact of the Trump tax reform. Its greatest recent mistake was underestimating inflation in 2021 and 2022 by a factor of about three. (Hat tip to our contributor Mickey Levy for the numbers.)

And because forward guidance encourages investors to react to what the Fed will do rather than sending market signals about economic conditions, officials mute a source of information that could inform policy-making.

One reason Mr. Powell was so slow to respond to accelerating inflation after the pandemic was that the Fed previously had committed to lower-for-longer interest rates. He reinforced this in August 2020 when the Fed promised to tolerate above-2% inflation to make up for periods of slower price rises.

A fear of spooking markets with unanticipated rate hikes deterred rapid action to fight inflation. Forward-guiding Fed officials kept calling inflation “transitory,” a word that will haunt the Fed for years.

Forward guidance also drags the Fed into politics since officials find it hard to resist opining on fiscal and other debates to explain their monetary views. Mr. Warsh may not be able to deter other Fed Governors from popping off in speeches. But he could set an example by ending the “dot plot” era, limiting his press conferences, and focusing his public statements on major policy turns and the semi-annual Humphrey-Hawkins testimony to Congress.

Mr. Warsh has said he welcomes debate over monetary policy, and that’s to his credit. But forward guidance has been a mistake, and a cacophony of Fed voices has confused markets and been harmful to the Fed’s credibility and independence. A course correction is overdue.

Right. So are we way better off than we were or worse off? Do we know yet? Fed left interest rates where they were last meeting so it must not be awful and said they may go up in the future. Then a week later at a conference he said they may not need to b/c that job report came out.

Not to mention he is a crypto guy right... I wonder if he thinks were better off or worse off than we have been thinking and what or how he thinks crypto may play into it if he thinks its bad off which he would believe crypto would make it better somehow (appears to be their plan) whatever their plan is if thats what they got brewing or not.