How We Find Quality Income Stocks + a Preview of This Month’s Pick
In 2009, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke dropped the fed funds rate all the way to zero … and then he left it there through the end of his tenure in 2014. Many call the Fed’s zero interest rate policy (aka “ZIRP”) under Bernanke “financial repression” because it punished savers and lenders who could no longer earn a respectable yield on conservative debt securities, such as with U.S. Treasury bonds. A lot of retirees depend on the yield, or “income,” that bond investments routinely pay out. When that all vanished thanks to ZIRP, they began to look to other investments for yield.
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