interest rates

First Ever Fed Press Conference

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Today marks the first time the Federal Reserve will hold a press conference to go along with it’s decision on whether to change interest rates. Most observers expect the Fed to leave interest rates unchanged (basically at zero percent), so the real action will be in the details that emerge from the press conference where questions about how the economy is doing, what the Fed is doing, and how long they think those things will last, will take center stage. In another change, the Federal Open Market Committee will also release the quarterly growth and inflation estimates that is uses to make its rate decisions today. Usually, the Fed releases those numbers weeks later. Today’s changes could make for a very volatile day in the markets because no one has ever done things this way before, so no one really knows how they are supposed to react. Will the markets over-react to something Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says? Will the markets react less than they would otherwise given how fresh all the data is? Or is this all just a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing? We’ll all find out later today.

Inflation Stays Tame – Fed Not Raising Rates Soon

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Everyone is worried about if and when the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates, even though the Fed itself continues to say that it is not considering doing so. That is what happens when interest rates are so low (basically just above zero) that everyone knows the only way they can go is up.

How To Fight Credit Card Company Interest Rate Increases

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With Congress passing legislation to reign in some of the worst credit card abuses, credit card companies have been scrambling to get their terms and conditions, also known as the card contract, changed to terms more favorable to them before the new rules take affect. By changing your credit card agreement before the new credit card law takes affect, these card issuers can avoid having to play fairly as dictated by the new rules. However, this can mean bad things for customers and credit card account holders. Apparently, the banks aren’t concerned about losing business, because they are modifying terms on credit accounts left and right regardless of the person’s credit score or credit history. What can the average credit card customer do to fight back? Unfortunately, not too much, but there are some things that you can do to keep the credit card companies from cheating you out of your hard earned money. Credit Card Interest Rate Increases Under the old law, whenever a bank wanted to increase the interest rate it charged customers, it just sent out a letter saying that they were changing raising the interest rate. Consumers had no rights to do anything about it. The …

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Refinancing the Mortgage to Take Advantage of Lower Interest Rates

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Ok, it’s time to look at refinancing the old homestead’s mortgage.  I’ve been putting it off because of holidays and the fact that rates can still go lower even though the Fed recently cut rates to zero.  Now, it’s time to take a serious look at refinancing and how it might work out for my family.  I’ll be posting a series of articles here on Finance Gourmet to help guide you through the process.  By writing these articles in “real time” with my refinance adventure, you can see the whole process from A to Z and use it as a guide for your own refinancing now, and in the future. To make sure you don’t miss out, I recommend grabbing the RSS feed.  If you aren’t familiar with RSS or “feeds”, they are basically a way to get the article pulled from here by a RSS reader which is just software that goes and gets articles from the websites you ask it to watch.  That way, you don’t have to remember to open your bookmarks to get back here.  It is kind of like the old idea of subscribing to emails that updated you on website content, but this way, …

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