As widely expected, Norges Bank today kept its monetary policy rate unchanged at 2.0%. Hence, all focus was on the accompanying Monetary Policy Report and the press release.
The focal point in the Monetary Policy Report was the new interest rate path. 2011 is revised down by 27bp, 2012 by 11bp, but 2012 is actually revised up by 6bp. Hence, the rate path is primarily revised lower in 2011 and the end-point in 2013 is actually higher. Norges Bank has pencilled in the first rate hike over the summer of 2011 compared with December/January in the June rapport. It was a bit of a surprise that Norges Bank does not see the first rate hike before the summer next year.
However, if we compare with the surprise revisions made by the Riksbank yesterday, we believe the Norges Bank revisions were less pronounced, not least as the end-point was actually revised higher. Furthermore, the revisions were very much expected by the market. Read full post…
The crash-and-burn of the financial system, a prolonged recession, and high unemployment obviously cause us enormous distress. We are forced to ask ourselves, “What can we afford now?”
The collapse has also made many of us rethink what we care about. We’re finally asking, “Are all these things we’ve been buying (and probably still making payments on) truly making us happy?”
I started asking myself related questions long ago. Where do we look to derive value? What’s the source? As I talked with people, did research, and listened more intrusively to my own internal voice, I realized that in the process of choosing and buying we are actually being engulfed (essentially consumed), by the stuff in our lives.
It seems clear that our metric of Gross National Stuff isn’t moving us toward a happy path. Stuff noise
Any student can tell you that the first thing they get in the mail when they return to campus is a wad of offers from credit card companies. But what most students and their parents did not know until recently was that colleges are behind the effort to get students to sign up for plastic.
Lucrative multi-million dollar contracts give colleges a kickback, so when a student applies for college the university also hopes they will apply for lots of credit cards. Buying all those pizzas or taking out emergency cash advances means big bonuses to colleges that reap as much as a dollar per student. But they can make even more if students carry a lot of debt and don’t pay it off right away.
According to the terms of one such arrangement, for example, Bank America agreed to pay the University of Central Florida $1 for each nonstudent cardholder who carries debt from one year to the next, plus $1 for each currently enrolled student cardholders. B
