Usually it's the other way around

Peters beats DeMaio.

Californians want to slit their wrists

Wow.

Check out the map of people's life satisfaction by city.

There's obviously a huge weather effect, with people being much happier in the sun belt and miserable in the cold northeast, but California manages to create misery even with the country's best weather and beautiful geography!

Therefore, it will not happen?

GOP Senate Takeover Would Put Fed Under Microscope

A Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate on Election Day would promise increased political turbulence for the Federal Reserve.

Financial executives say a GOP-led Senate would ratchet up congressional scrutiny of the central bank's interest- rate policies as well as its regulatory duties as overseer of the nation's largest financial firms. Republicans haven't controlled the Senate since before the 2008 financial crisis and recession, which put a spotlight on the Fed and its powers.

"If the Republicans take control of the Senate and thus have control of both the House and the Senate--two words for the Federal Reserve: Watch out," said Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Leading the GOP wish list in dealing with the Fed would be legislation to open the central bank to more scrutiny of its interest-rate decisions, using congressional audits of monetary-policy matters that Fed officials strongly oppose. Many Republican lawmakers also want to require the Fed to use a mathematical rule to guide interest-rate decisions or shift its focus more directly to inflation rather than inflation together with unemployment. All of that would come on top of heightened bipartisan scrutiny of the Fed's regulatory moves.

Nah, even if the Republicans take the Senate, I'm sure the Fed will find the new majority can be quite flexible...

Chris Farley lives!

Zimbabwe Jim to the rescue

Two weeks ago, we pointed out that the only thing making stocks go up was Fed money-printing, and asked, "Would asset price stagnation or declines bring Janet back to the Ctrl+P button?"

Magic 8-ball says, "It is decidedly so."

The Federal Reserve should consider delaying the end of its bond purchase program to halt the decline in inflation expectations, said St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard.

Loose Janets sink planets

Even the dummies at the IMF are catching on to the idea that you can't solve all the world's problems by printing infinite amounts of money.

NYT:

As economists and politicians heap pressure on global central banks to continue, and even escalate, their unusually loose monetary policies in order to spur global demand, the fear that these measures could provoke another market convulsion is spreading.

“A major lesson of the last crisis is that accommodative monetary policy contributed to financial excesses,” said Lucas Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank. “We are pursuing a similar policy for good reason. But there are limits — if you do this for too long, risks in the financial markets will materialize.”

[...]

“What we see is extraordinary risk-taking in the financial markets while in the real economy risk-taking has taken a holiday,” said Claudio Borio, a senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements, a clearinghouse for global central banks.

Generalissimo Essen P. Fivehundred is still dead

A year and a half ago, we posted He's dead, Jim, showing that the ratio of the stock market to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet had absolutely flatlined, meaning the correlation of stock prices to Dirty Fed money-printing was essentially perfect.

Now with the Fed promising to halt QE this month, we thought an update would be highly relevant.

The verdict?

Still dead!  The stock market has flatlined down 75% from its 2000 peak in Fed balance sheet terms.

Does the impending end of QE mean the end of asset price appreciation?  Would asset price stagnation or declines bring Janet back to the Ctrl+P button?