What we’re reading (9/17)
“Federal Reserve Cuts Interest Rates For First Time This Year, Sees 2 More Cuts In 2025” (Yahoo! Finance). “The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday — its first reduction of 2025 — and projected two more cuts for the rest of this year. The central bank voted in a split decision to cut its benchmark interest rate to a range of 4.00% to 4.25%. The 25 basis point cut marked the first time the Fed has eased rates since last December.”
“Miran’s Fed Dissent Makes A Splash, Fails To Sway The Outcome” (Reuters). “If President Donald Trump hoped that putting a close ally at the Federal Reserve would grab headlines, White House economic adviser Stephen Miran's dissent and way-below consensus interest rate projection on Wednesday delivered. If the hope was to have someone on the inside to get the Fed to lower interest rates as sharply as Trump wants, Miran's lone dissent was evidence the gambit had failed, at least for now.”
“SEC Allows Public Companies To Block Investors From Class-Action Lawsuits” (Financial Times). “The US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday gave public companies a powerful new tool to curb shareholder lawsuits, as chair Paul Atkins pledged to ‘make IPOs great again’. The regulator said it will no longer block companies from the public markets if they banned shareholders from filing class-action lawsuits, ripping up a decades-old policy as it seeks to ease compliance requirements and fulfil President Donald Trump’s deregulation drive.”
“The Economy Is Turning Into A Black Box” (Peter Orszag, The Atlantic). “This situation is unsustainable. Business decisions about hiring, firing, and investment depend on knowledge of what’s happening in the wider economy. So do the choices made by policy makers in the White House and at the Federal Reserve. An incredible range of sophisticated private sources—including real-time payroll data, online transaction records, and consumer-spending databases—offer alternative sources of fine-grained, up-to-the-minute data that could, under the right conditions, be used to supplement a survey-based approach and provide a more dynamic and accurate picture of the state of the economy. The problem is that the government is not even trying to use them.”
“AI Agents Are Getting Ready To Handle Your Whole Financial Life” (Wall Street Journal). “Everyone who manages his or her own finances can relate to the headache. A half dozen apps and logins… Investments spread across several retirement and taxable accounts, employer-sponsored 401(k)s and pension funds.… It can be an arduous task to get a quick read on how much you have allocated to stocks, bonds and cash, not to mention picking the right mix of assets and periodically rebalancing it. Many people pay advisers to ease that burden of complexity. But in the not-too-distant future, your AI assistant could be doing much of that work for you.”
