Banking, finance, and taxes

FOMC Minutes Show a Punt

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published September 2, 2009, 2:09pm ET · 1 min read

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The minutes of the August 11 and 12 FOMC meeting shows a Fed that is slowly growing more confident in things, yet the conviction is low.  The FOMC was more confident that the recession is ending and that growth will resume in the second half of the year after recent policy moves.  It also noted seeing a benefit in tapering off MBS purchases and that they have cooled to expanding TALF assets.  The notion of growth is muted as FOMC officials expect a slow recovery and noted that households face significant headwinds.  The governors also see the economy vulnerable to shocks as jobs are still weak.  There was a note of concern over future bank losses, but so far there is no major concern that inflation is about to roar.

So far there is very little market impact here.  FULL MINUTES are here.

JON C. OGG

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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