Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday discussed the Fed’s plans for its balance sheet. That’s the list of all the assets it owns, and it is huge: $4.5 trillion worth. The plan is to slowly shrink that down by a few billion dollars a month, starting soon. Here’s how the Fed came to own […]

The Fed today publishes its Labor Market Conditions Index for the month of April. The release follows Friday’s news that the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4 percent last month, near a 10-year low. The index, which Janet Yellen started releasing publicly in 2014, goes further than just looking at the unemployment rate and payroll job […]

President Donald Trump and the Fed have had a bit of an up-and-down relationship even before he became president. At one point, he accused Fed Chair Janet Yellen of keeping interest rates low to help President Barack Obama. Another time, he said raising rates would be a disaster. To be fair, he has also said […]

President Donald Trump has said he wants to roll back much of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that Congress passed after the financial crisis. Smaller regional banks have honed in on one part of Dodd-Frank they would like to change: the rule on how big a bank has to be for it to be considered […]