The celebrated Taylor Rule methodology has established that the decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee concerning possible changes in short term interest rates reflected in Fed Funds are influenced by deviations from a desired level of inflation and from potential output. The Taylor...

This paper considers the directional predictability of daily returns for both gold and silver. These two metals have had a long history behaving sometimes as complements and other times as substitutes. We use daily data from June of 2008 through February of 2015. The last two years were removed...

The Financial Crisis of 2007-09 caused the U.S. economy to experience a relatively long recession from December 2007 to June 2009. Both the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve undertook expansive fiscal and monetary policies to minimize both the severity and length of the recession. Most...

The behavior of gold as an investment asset has been researched extensively. For the very long run, that is several decades, gold does not outperform equities. However, for shorter periods, gold responds to fears of inflation, stock market corrections, currency crises and financial instabilities...

After the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008 and the financial panic that ensued, the Federal Reserve moved rapidly to reduce the federal funds rate to .25%. It was quickly judged that additional measures were needed to stabilize the U.S. economy. Beginning in December 2008, the...

We focus on the first 20 years of the Euro, from 1999 to 2019, and we split this period into two approximate decades to examine the performance of three benchmarks: the real GDP quarterly growth, the annualized real per capita GDP changes and unemployment. These illustrate that the under...

During the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, the price of crude oil dropped markedly from about $140 per barrel in June 2008 to about $40 in early 2009. As Quantitative Easing allowed the U.S. economy to stabilize and return to slow growth, oil prices increased and averaged about $100 during...

The phenomenal growth of individual retirement accounts in the U.S., and globally, challenges both individuals and their advisors to rationally manage these investments. The two essential differences between an individual retirement account and an institutional portfolio are the length of the...

This paper investigates inter-relationships among the price behavior of oil, gold and the euro using time series and neural network methodologies. Traditionally gold is a leading indicator of future inflation. Both the demand and supply of oil as a key global commodity are impacted by...

This study uses two data mining methodologies: Classification and Regression Trees (C&RT) and Generalized Rule Induction (GRI) to uncover patterns among daily cash closing prices of eight currency markets. Data from 2000 through 2009 is used, with the last year held out to test the robustness of...