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The US Federal Reserve appears to have decided to halt quantitative easing, causing bond prices to drop and yields to rise. The yield for the 1-year Treasury bond rose more than 0.3 percentage point to about 3.65%.

Poland-based businesses are seen to be adversely affected by the government's plan to cancel currency options contracts. Steel maker Odlewnie Polskie has filed for bankruptcy due to its losses from currency contracts. The situation in the country is seen as graver than those in other European Union states.

Slovakia's adoption of the euro has the government on the alert for any price hikes. The government has put in place measures for detecting those who will abuse the switch to the new currency. Giving of change in Slovak crowns has been the predominant violation in abuse cases.

The Bond Buyer's indexes edged higher for the second consecutive week as a higher-than-expected September consumer price index dashed hopes that the Federal Reserve Board would ease monetary policy. The [...]

As of Tuesday, July 15, crowds outside branches of the failed California bank IndyMac were getting ugly. On the second business day after federal agents seized control of bank assets […]

The decision by the Central Bank of Kuwait to stop banks placing excess liquidity with it, intended to stop currency speculation, has led to a fall in inter-bank interest rates [...]

IN THE WAKE OF THE FRENCH AND DUTCH defeats of a proposed constitution for the European Union (EU), there are modern echoes of an ancient chant heard when one king […]

After cutting short-term interest rates 13 times, the Federal Reserve did something on the last day of June that it hadn't done in nearly four years. In a move that [...]

The 25-basis-point hike in federal funds rate by the Federal Reserve on June 30 was perhaps the most anticipated and talked about policy move in recent years. The groundwork for [...]

There has been another interesting side-effect of the fall in sterling against the euro. France is on the verge of overtaking the UK to become the world's fourth-biggest economy. The […]

2001 was a good year for the UK economy. First estimates suggest that GDP growth was 2.4%, in line with the long-term sustainable average. Even though both turned around in [...]

We examine the relationship between monetary conditions and global stock returns. Previous studies established that U.S. stock returns during expansive U.S. monetary periods are significantly higher than returns during restrictive periods. We found that this pattern prevails in non-US markets; furthermore, the pattern exists relative to both local and U.S. monetary conditions. By examining several investment strategies, we show that investors could have improved portfolio performance in the period studied by using both U.S. and local monetary conditions to guide their portfolio allocations. Using monetary conditions to determine portfolio composition would have been consistently beneficial throughout the past 30 years. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Nowhere has monetary policy been as tight as in Argentina, which operates a currency board under which the money supply must be backed 100% by foreign reserves. Argentina's consumer prices [...]

Federal Reserve Chmn Alan Greenspan has considerable influence over the direction the stock market could take, as demonstrated by his comments in 1995, 1996 and 1998 about market and economic conditions. In 1995, his positive comments helped propel the Dow above 4000.

Long-term bond yields are at their lowest in 18 months, trading at the same level with 5.75% short-term interest rate as they did when it was 3.25%. An essay in the Economist argued that governments do have power over financial markets, challenging the theory of rational expectations.

CHICAGO -- Prices in the credit and interest rate futures markets could climb a little higher in the next few days, traders believe. But market players are not quite ready [...]