Posts tagged with "Federal Reserve"

Above, for Millennials, happiness would come from a $525,000 annual salary. (Photo source: TLNT)

Millennials say they need $525,000 a year to be happy. A Nobel Prize winner says they’re right.

November 27, 2023

A new survey has found that the average person needs $1.2 million in the bank to be happy. For Millennials, happiness would come from a $525,000 annual salary, reports Entrepreneur.

Money might actually be able to buy happiness—and each generation has a different idea of what that price tag would be.

On Monday, Noivember 20, Empower—a Colorado-based financial services company—released the results of a survey conducted by The Harris Poll in August that asked 2,034 Americans aged 18 and over what they think the key to financial happiness really is. Turns out, 59% of respondents think happiness can be bought, and the average person believes it would take having $1.2 million in the bank to be truly happy financially.

When it comes to annual salary, the average respondent thinks they need $284,167 each year to be happy. Here’s what each generation said they need to earn annually, as well as the net worth required, to achieve happiness:

  • Gen Z: $128,000, with a net worth of $487,711
  • Millennials: $525,000, with a net worth of $1,699,571
  • Gen X: $130,000, with a net worth of $1,213,759
  • Boomers: $124,000, with a net worth of $999,945

Men said they needed to earn $381,000 annually, while women said $183,000 would make them happy.

A 2023 study coauthored by another Nobel Prize recipient Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University found that happiness can improve with higher earnings of up to $500,000 a year, supporting the Millennial survey respondents’ predictions.

“In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness,” Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Penn’s Wharton School and coauthor of the study, said. “The exception is people who are financially well-off, but unhappy. For instance, if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help. For everyone else, more money was associated with higher happiness to somewhat varying degrees.”

That differs from a 2010 study from Nobel Prize recipient Angus Deaton, also of Princeton, found money could only boost happiness up to $75,000 in annual earnings, and after that point, extra money had little impact.

Still, there’s more to it than just the annual salary. According to the survey, inflation, high interest rates, and student loans are weighing on Americans’ financial security, and having the comfort to spend money on everyday items can boost the feeling of financial happiness. For example, 62% of Millennials said they would be willing to pay $7 for a daily coffee “because of the joy it brings.”

The latest economic data could make Americans’ financial happiness goals more achievable. Inflation is continuing to come down as the United States recovers from the pandemic—the Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation, increased 3.2% year-over-year in October—a decrease from the 3.7% reading a month prior.

The Federal Reserve also has pressed pause on its interest rate hikes, given the promising inflation data, and the central bank no longer forecasts a recession as the year comes to a close.

The latest Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve, found some hope for Millennials when it comes to net worth. Net worth for the typical family surged 37% from 2019 through 2022, the survey found; and the median net worth of Americans aged 35 to 44 was $135,000 in 2022, up from $105,610 in 2019.

Research contact: @Entrepreneur

Above, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Treasury Chief Lynn Malerba sign banknotes. (Photo source: Shelby Tauber for Reuters/CNN)

Two women see their signatures printed on U.S. currency for the first time

December 12, 2022

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen traveled to Texas on Thursday, December 8, to mark an important and historic milestone—touring the Fort Worth Bureau of Engraving and Printing facility to observe firsthand the printing of $1 and $5 bills with her signature for the first time, reports CNN.

Yellen became the latest Treasury secretary to sign U.S. currency and the first woman Treasury secretary to have her signature on a U.S. banknote. U.S. Treasurer Lynn Malerba also signed the note, marking the first time the signatures of two women are featured on U.S. currency—and the first time a Native American’s signature has appeared on U.S. currency.

Its been tradition for more than a century that both the U.S. treasurer and the Treasury secretary sign currency to make the bills legal tender. And despite Yellen being in her role since January 2021, it’s taken until now because of the delayed appointment of a new treasurer. In June, President Joe Biden appointed Malerba to the post.

Yellen and Malerba viewed the official engraving plates of sheets of dollars, using magnifying glasses to see their signatures. Yellen was then shown how to engrave a number into a conduction plate that will be used to produce the currency. She even got to push a button to print sheets of new bills.

Yellen said in remarks after her tour that she was “truly honored” by the banknotes, which will be delivered to the Federal Reserve this month and begin to circulate to Americans’ wallets “starting in the new year.”

“You would think this would be a straightforward process. But the founding fathers did not account for what seems to be a common attribute for Treasury secretaries—namely, terrible handwriting,” Yellen joked.

“I will admit I spent some quality time practicing my signature before submitting it,” she added.

The newly printed bills feature the signatures of “Lynn Roberge Malerba” and “Janet L. Yellen,” both written in clear, legible script.

The Fort Worth facility is one of just two places where paper currency is printed in the United States, a Treasury official told CNN, and it prints more than half of new bills every year. The new bills are only being printed at this facility as of now, the official noted; but will begin to be printed at a second facility, in Washington, D.C., eventually.

Research contact: @CNN

Above, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Photo source: Fox News)

Progressives led by AOC call for Biden to replace Fed Chair Powell

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September 1, 2021

Progressive Democrats, including New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling on President Joe Biden to give the Federal Reserve a sweeping makeover by replacing Jerome Powell as chairman, CNN reports.

“We urge President Biden to reimagine a Federal Reserve focused on eliminating climate risk and advancing racial and economic justice,” the lawmakers said in a statement released on Tuesday morning, August 31.

In addition to Ocasio-Cortez, the statement was issued Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Mondaire Jones of New York, and Chuy Garcia of Illinois—all members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Powell, a Republican and former investment banker, was nominated to lead the powerful Federal Reserve by former President Donald Trump in 2017, who later sharply criticized his handpicked chairman.

Powell’s term as chair expires in February, and the White House has not said whether he will be reappointed.

According to CNN, under Powell, the Fed wasted little time responding forcefully to the economic fallout from the pandemic in March 2020. Economists have credited the Fed’s historic actions with helping to prevent a full-blown depression and financial crisis in the United States.

The Fed is tasked by Congress to maximize the number of American jobs while keeping inflation low. Although the Democrats in the statement credited the Powell-led Fed with making changes to how it approaches its goal of full employment, they voiced concern over his track record on the climate crisis and regulation.

“Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve has taken very little action to mitigate the risk climate change poses to our financial system,” the lawmakers said in the statement.

However, the Fed did join an international network of global financial regulators focused on climate change in late 2020. In June, Powell warned that the climate crisis poses “profound challenges for the global economy and certainly the financial system.”

The AOC-led statement also criticized the Fed for “weakening” financial regulations enacted after the Great Recession, including capital and liquidity requirements, stress tests and the Volcker Rule. Powell has previously disputed the argument that the Fed has weakened regulations.

The Fed chair is appointed by the president. The term lasts four years. Looking for continuity, former Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama reappointed Fed chairs that were appointed by previous presidents, both of whom were Republicans. But Trump did not reappoint Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who was appointed by Obama.

A White House official told CNN on Tuesday that when it comes to appointing Fed officials, Biden “will appoint the candidates who[m] he thinks will be the most effective in implementing monetary policy.”

The Federal Reserve declined to comment.

Research contact: @CNN

Above, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. (Photo source: White House)

Mnuchin puts $455 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief funds beyond Yelin’s reach

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November 26, 2020

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has moved $455 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief capital from the Federal Reserve back into the Treasury’s General Fund—making it much more difficult for his chosen successor, Janet Yellen, to access the emergency funding, The Hill reports.

Indeed, the political news outlet notes, it may require another act of Congress for Mnuchin’s designed successor to deploy COVID relief patyments.

Mnuchin said last week that he was shuttering a handful of the Fed’s emergency lending facilities, a move the central bank opposed in a rare critical statement. While those facilities were little-used during the pandemic, they were seen as confidence boosters for capital markets.

Mnuchin at the time requested the Fed return the funding, which Congress appropriated to cover potential pandemic-related losses, saying the CARES Act from March set a legal deadline for the facilities to expire by year’s end.

CARES Act watchdog, Bharat Ramamurti—appointed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) last April to oversee the funds—told The Hill that Mnuchin’s move was unlawful. “This is Treasury’s latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden Administration,” he said on Twitter. The good news is that it’s illegal and can be reversed next year. For its part, the Fed should not go along with this attempted sabotage and should retain the CARES Act funds it already has.

Neither the Treasury Department nor the Biden transition team immediately responded to a request for comment.

Research contact: @thehill

Above, President Donald Trump. (Posted by sheepn0more on #trump/Instagram)

Trump threatens to adjourn Congress in order to unilaterally confirm his nominees

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April 17, 2020

“I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be,” President Donald Trump told Fox News in November 2017. And he continues to think that his choices are the only ones of value.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that the president threatened on April 15 to adjourn both chambers of Congress so he can appoint his nominees for key positions without confirmation by the Senate.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports, during a news conference at the White House on Wednesday, Trump called on lawmakers to formally adjourn the House and Senate so he can make recess appointments for positions he said were important to the administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Senate, which confirms a president’s nominees, has been conducting what are called pro forma sessions while lawmakers are back in their states, sheltering in place.

No legislative business is conducted during these brief meetings, which sometimes last only a few minutes, but they technically prevent the president from making recess appointments.

If lawmakers don’t agree to adjourn and end the pro forma sessions, “I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress,” President Trump avowed. “The current practice of leaving town while conducting phony pro forma sessions is a dereliction of duty that the American people cannot afford during this crisis. It’s a scam, what they do.”

Among the appointments Trump said he wanted to make, the Journal reported, was his nominee to head the agency that oversees Voice of America, conservative filmmaker Michael Pack, who has been blocked by Democrats. The White House has accused the government-backed news organization of spreading foreign propaganda—a charge VOA strongly denies.

In addition to the VOA nominee, Trump pointed to his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, as well as nominees for positions on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and in the Treasury Department and the Agriculture Department.

The Constitution gives the president the power to adjourn Congress only in the rare circumstances of a disagreement between the two chambers over when to adjourn. No president has ever exercised the authority to adjourn it.

President Barack Obama challenged the Senate’s practice of holding pro forma sessions to try to block his constitutional power to make recess appointments. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against  Obama’s end run around the Senate in 2014.

Trump said he was reluctant to make recess appointments but would do so if Congress doesn’t act on his nominees.

For Mr. Trump’s strategy to work he would need the cooperation of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Kentucky), who would have to force a disagreement with the House over when to adjourn. Trump and McConnell discussed the idea in a phone call earlier Wednesday, the Journal reports.

The president acknowledged that the effort would likely result in a legal challenge. “We’ll see who wins,” he said.

Research contact: @WSJ

Representative Darrell Issa (R-California) is once again the wealthiest member of Congress. (Photo source: opensecrets.org)

Rich man, poor man: Fed legislators are worth 10X more than voters

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March 5, 2018

The median net worth of an adult American is $44,900 , based on findings of a Business Insider study released in June 2017. That’s less than one-tenth of median net worth of a federal legislator, according to a study by Roll Call released on February 27.

The people’s representatives just keep getting richer, and doing so faster than the people they represent. Indeed, according to Roll Call’s data, the median minimum net worth (meaning half are worth more; half less) of today’s Senators and House members was $511,000 at the start of this Congress, an upward push of 16% over just the past two years. The total wealth of all current members was at least $2.43 billion when the 115th Congress began.

The political news source noted, “The disparity becomes clear after examining the most recent financial disclosures of virtually every current lawmaker. The news is not likely to do them any good during a midterm campaign year when disapproval of Capitol Hill remains in record territory and sentiment remains strong that politicians in Washington are far too disconnected from the lives of their constituents.”

For every 13 members of the U.S. Congress, Roll Call found, one may fairly be dubbed a “1 percenter,” the term of derision imposed by liberal groups on the richest 1% of Americans. Data from the Federal Reserve pegged the net worth threshold for these people at $10.4 million in 2016, a mark exceeded by 26 Republicans and 17 Democrats during this session of Congress.

Specifically, more than half of the collective worth of Congress is held by 12 members, Roll Call documented. Among the 10 richest member of the current U.S. Congress are the following:

  1. Darrell Issa (R-California): $283M
  2. Greg Guianforte (R-Montana): $136M
  3. Jared Polis (D-Colorado): $123M
  4. Dave Trott (R-Michigan) $119M
  5. Michael McCaul (R-Rexas): $113M
  6. John Delaney (D-Maryland) $93M
  7. Mark Warner (D-Virginia): $93M
  8. Vern Buchanan (R-Florida) $74M
  9. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut): $70M
  10. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) $58M
  11. Tom Rooney (R-Florida): $55M
  12. Trey Hollingsworth (R-Indiana): $50M

Below this rung of the phenomenally prosperous is a thicker belt of the merely flush— the 153 House members (13 more than in the previous Congress) and 50 senators who are millionaires, at least on paper. This stands in contrast to the 7.4% of U.S. households that had amassed a net worth above $1 million in 2016, their home values included, according to the Spectrum Group investment research firm.

By coincidence, 38% of the women in Congress are millionaires—identical to the share of millionaires in the total membership.

The congressional millionaire ranks skew old, “reinforcing how many people enter politics only after they’ve assured themselves of a solid financial footing.” Roll Call said. A little more than half of the five dozen lawmakers born before the end of World War II are worth more than $1 million, as are 43% of the Hill’s Baby Boomers (or the five out of eight members born between 1946 and 1964). But among the quarter of the membership from Generation X and the handful of Millennials, only 20% are millionaire.

At the other end of the spectrum are nearly one-quarter of the members (123),  whose financial disclosures reflect a negative net worth. For many this is true only on paper, because they owe plenty on their home mortgages, which must be reported while the value of their real estate is not. (Neither is their annual $174,000 government salary.)

And in the middle are the “typical” members, with senators boasting a significantly better median net worth ($1.4 million for Republicans, $946,000 for Democrats) than House members, where the median figure for both caucuses is just north of $400,000.

A very similar figure, $397,000, is the minimum net worth disclosed on the essentially identical form for 2016 filled out by Vice President Mike Pence, who spent a dozen years as a federal legislator from Indiana.

President Donald Trump’s most recent form, however, describes a chief executive far richer than anyone in the legislative branch-—worth at least $1.1 billion at the time of his election.

Research contact: davidhawkings@cqrollcall.com