Federal Reserve

Last week Atlas sent a note called How Did We Get Here?

Tour guides are useful when exploring unfamiliar territories.  They can help make sure a trip accomplishes desired outcomes while making sure travelers avoid places where calamitous outcomes are more likely.  While they cannot directly prevent spoiled vacations, they help improve the odds that one will be enjoyed.

Imagine the Federal Reserve as a skilled dancer, gracefully navigating the dance floor of the economy.  Right now, they’re performing a delicate waltz, trying to keep in step with a weakening labor market and persistent inflation that refuses to approach their two percent target.

Imagine the Federal Reserve as a skilled dancer, gracefully navigating the dance floor of the economy.  Right now, they’re performing a delicate waltz, trying to keep in step with a weakening labor market and persistent inflation that refuses to approach their two percent target.

On Wednesday, America’s central bank made its first downward adjustment to its Federal Funds Rate since the pandemic was just getting started back in March 2020.  This interest rate is what banks charge each other for overnight loans when their cash reserves aren’t adequate to meet weekly regulatory requirements.  While it does not impact other rates directly, the Fed Fund

Last week in this space Atlas noted the dramatic revisions to employment figures originally published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  Click here to revisit it.

Olympic events always have favored athletes, but the contests must be completed to know who really was the best at a particular moment.  Lots of money is on the line, especially in America.  To win often means a life of more publicity and even marketing deals.  For surprise winners, they’re happy to have the opportunity to prove themselves.  The Olympics would be borin

Many resources are thrown at solving the last-mile problem.  Logistics firms spend countless dollars trying to optimize the final phase of a delivery.  The same challenge haunts public transportation in many metropolitan cities.  Once a rider exits the train or bus, how do they efficiently get to their end destination?  Global Positioning System (GPS) technology has helped b

For not fully understood reasons, conditions for the Big Bang were met about 13.8 billion years ago.  This unfathomable event set off a series of reactions.  Evidence of the reaction’s aftermath is observable even today.  For instance, according to NASA, we can still see the heat that was there roughly 380,000 years after the expansion of the universe (13.42 billion years a