Alan Greenspan: QE Failed To Help The Economy, The Unwind Will Be Painful, "Buy Gold"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-...-help-economy-unwind-will-be-painful-buy-gold
It appears it is time for some Hillary-Clinton-esque backtracking and Liesman-esque translation of just what the former Federal Reserve Chief really meant. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the Fed chief from 1987 to 2006 says the Fed's bond-buying program fell short of its goals, and had a lot more to add.
Mr. Greenspan’s comments to the Council on Foreign Relations came as Fed officials were meeting in Washington, D.C., and expected to announce within hours an end to the bond purchases.
He said the bond-buying program was ultimately a mixed bag. He said that the purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities did help lift asset prices and lower borrowing costs. But it didn’t do much for the real economy.
“Effective demand is dead in the water” and the effort to boost it via bond buying “has not worked,” said Mr. Greenspan. Boosting asset prices, however, has been “a terrific success.”
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He observed that history shows central banks can only prick bubbles at great economic cost. “It’s only by bringing the economy down can you burst the bubble,” and that was a step he wasn't willing to take while helming the Fed, he said.
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The question of when officials should begin raising interest rates is “one of those questions I cannot answer,” Mr. Greenspan said.
He also said, “I don’t think it’s possible” for the Fed to end its easy-money policies in a trouble-free manner....
"Recent episodes in which Fed officials hinted at a shift toward higher interest rates have unleashed significant volatility in markets, so there is no reason to suspect that the actual process of boosting rates would be any different, Mr. Greenspan said.
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“I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves,” Mr. Greenspan he said.
And finally - while CNBC's audience is told what a terrible thing gold is, "The Maestro", having personally created the financial cataclysm the world finds itself in following a lifetime of belief in fiat, Keynesian ideology and "fixing" one bubble with an even greater and more destructive asset bubble, has suddenly had an epiphany and now has a very different message from the one he preached during his decades as the head of the Fed.
Mr. Greenspan said gold is a good place to put money these days given its value as a currency outside of the policies conducted by governments.
What Greenspan failed to add is that it is thanks to his disastrous policies (subsequently adopted by Bernanke and Yellen) that gold is the "place to put money."
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FOMC: "We Screwed Up"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-29/fomc-we-screwed
The FOMC statement will follow along these lines:
"We completely screwed up by increasing the FED's balance sheet to over $4 trillion. We regret not having allowed the capital markets to freely normalize, instead of mortgaging the Nation's future to the point where every generation's prospects henceforth will be lower than the one before until the end of time. We are now stuffed to the brim like pigs, and have no other choice but to continue along the same path, as we believe a dismal future is better than no future whatsoever.
That's all folks............................."
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Google’s New Computer With Human-Like Learning Abilities Will Program Itself
http://betabeat.com/2014/10/googles...-like-learning-abilities-will-program-itself/
The new hybrid device might not need humans at all.
Are we closer to AI? (Wikipedia)
In college, it wasn’t rare to hear a verbal battle regarding artificial intelligence erupt between my friends studying neuroscience and my friends studying computer science.
One rather outrageous fellow would mention the possibility of a computer takeover, and off they went. The neuroscience-savvy would awe at the potential of such hybrid technology as the CS majors argued we have nothing to fear, as computers will always need a programmer to tell them what to do.
Today’s news brings us to the Neural Turing Machine, a computer that will combine the way ordinary computers work with the way the human brain learns, enabling it to actually program itself. Perhaps my CS friends should reevaluate their position?
The computer is currently being developed by the London-based DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence firm that was acquired by Google earlier this year. Neural networks — which will enable the computer to invent programs for situations it has not seen before — will make up half of the computer’s architecture. Experts at the firm hope this will equip the machine with the means to create like a human, but still with the number-crunching power of a computer, New Scientist reports.
In two different tests, the NTM was asked to 1) learn to copy blocks of binary data and 2) learn to remember and sort lists of data. The results were compared with a more basic neural network, and it was found that the computer learned faster and produced longer blocks of data with fewer errors. Additionally, the computer’s methods were found to be very similar to the code a human programmer would’ve written to make the computer complete such a task.
These are extremely simple tasks for a computer to accomplish when being told to do so, but computers’ abilities to learn them on their own could mean a lot for the future of AI.
Elon Musk is not going to be happy about this.
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Great post from everyone this morning!!!
Did You spot the odd one out?
Kind Regards
