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Fed to keep rate low for two years

The Federal Reserve announced on Tuesday that it plans to hold the benchmark interest rate at “exceptionally low levels” through at least mid-2013, breaking from the central bank’s usual less precise timelines.

The action — which sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average swinging wildly up and down — signals the Federal Open Market Committee sees the path to economic recovery as longer and slower than anticipated even a few months ago.

With the Fed’s decision, the target interest rate will stay flat at between 0 and 0.25 percent for close to the next two years, if not longer.

The Fed’s committee on monetary policy said in a statement that it had discussed a variety of options to bolster the economy and is “prepared to employ these tools as appropriate” — though not quite yet.

Some Fed-watchers had anticipated that the central bank would announce a third round of quantitative easing, buying financial assets from the private sector using electronically created money.

But for the time being, the Fed held off, even as it painted a grimmer picture than it did just two months ago.

Data since the committee last met in June show that economic growth this year “has been considerably slower than the committee had expected,” the statement said.

The committee, it said, “expects a somewhat slower pace of recovery over coming quarters than it did at the time of the previous meeting and anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually toward levels that the committee judges to be consistent with its dual mandate” to promote maximum employment and price stability.

And, the committee said, “downside risks to the economic outlook have increased.”

“Indicators suggest a deterioration in overall labor market conditions in recent months, and the unemployment rate has moved up,” it continued. “Household spending has flattened out, investment in nonresidential structures is still weak, and the housing sector remains depressed. However, business investment in equipment and software continues to expand.

Ralph's son Henry » Blog Archive » ApacheBench fails after Mac ...

Apparently there is a patch to fix it, here , but I could not get it to work. That and the post is in another language, that google did a sos-so job of translating. I had read somewhere that this was fixed in new version of apache, version 2.3.14 ( download here ), which is in beta. I didn’t need to (or want to) install all of Apache, just ApacheBench so I compiled the source and copied over the binary. Here are the steps:

where it would return results that clearly were not correct.

At the time ( a few years ago ) I was able to reproduce the issues that Paul saw in specific cases, but not in others. I haven’t run these recently so I can’t say if this is still an issue.

Something to keep in mind if you start seeing results that go against the obvious.

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