Joel Rosario rides Orb during the 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs Saturday, May 4, 2013, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/J. David Ake)
Joel Rosario rides Orb during the 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs Saturday, May 4, 2013, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/J. David Ake)
Joel Rosario rides Orb reacts after the 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs Saturday, May 4, 2013, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Joel Rosario rides Orb during the 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs Saturday, May 4, 2013, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Joel Rosario reacts after riding Orb to victory in the 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs Saturday, May 4, 2013, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
Joel Rosario rides Orb reacts after winning the 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs Saturday, May 4, 2013, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) ? Orb was so far behind a wall of horses at the Kentucky Derby that even his jockey wasn't sure he could master the muddy track and make a run for the roses.
"I was really far back," Joel Rosario said. "I said hopefully he can go faster than that. I was saying maybe I was too far back, but it was so easy."
The bay colt made it look that way Saturday, splashing through the slop to win the Derby by 2 1-2 lengths and giving Hall of Fame trainer Shug McGaughey his first victory in the 3-year-old classic.
Long shot Golden Soul was second with Revolutionary third while Normandy Invasion faded to fourth.
Orb, the 5-1 favorite, broke from the No. 16 post and bided his time near the back of the pack early while Palace Malice set a blistering pace in the muck.
Orb was still idling in 16th place a half-mile into the race. On the turn for home, Rosario moved him past 11 horses into striking position in the middle of the track. With a quarter of a mile to go, Orb began picking off the leaders. The only question left was whether he could sustain his momentum on a surface that resembled creamy peanut butter.
"He was very relaxed, it's exactly what I wanted," Rosario said.
When the field turned for home on the cool, overcast afternoon at Churchill Downs, Normandy Invasion had the lead. But Orb was gearing up and prevailed in the deep stretch, carrying Rosario to his first Derby win.
"Perfect trip. I stayed on the outside I don't want to be too wide on the first turn. I was hoping somebody in the middle (of the race) didn't push me wide," he said.
Orb ran the 1? miles in 2:02.89
Orb paid $12.80, $7.40 and $5.40. Golden Soul, a 34-1 shot, returned $38.60 and $19.40 while Revolutionary paid $5.40 to show.
The 62-year-old McGaughey said the victory meant everything to him.
"I'm thrilled to death for (the owners), thrilled to death for the people who put so much time into this horse, and, of course, I'm thrilled to death for me," he said.
Todd Pletcher had a record-tying five runners. Revolutionary was the best of the "Todd Squad," followed by Charming Kitten (ninth), Overanalyze (11th), Palace Malice (12th) and Verrazano (14th).
Goldencents, owned in part by Rick Pitino, coach of Louisville's national basketball champions, finished a 17th. His jockey, Kevin Krigger, was trying to become the first black rider to win the race since 1902.
Rosie Napravnik was also bidding to make history as the first woman jockey to win the world's biggest horse race. She finished fifth aboard Mylute, the highest finish by a female rider.
D. Wayne Lukas, who won the Derby four times and would have been the oldest trainer to saddle a winner, sent out two runners. Oxbow, with three-time Derby winning jockey Gary Stevens aboard, finished sixth. Will Take Charge was eighth.
Lines of Battle from Ireland finished seventh, denying European champion trainer Aidan O'Brien the international victory.
The rain that pelted the track earlier in the day had stopped by the time 19 horses paraded to the post for the 139th Derby.
The crowd of 151,616 must have known something, with a surge of late money sending Orb off as the favorite after Revolutionary owned that position most of the day.
Winning co-owners Stuart Janney and Ogden Mills "Dinny" Phipps scored their first Derby victory. The first cousins are among the sport's blue bloods that include the old-money Whitney and Vanderbilt families.
Being from Lexington, the heart of Kentucky's horse country, McGaughey figured to be a regular Derby participant. But Orb was just his second starter since 1989, when McGaughey watched Easy Goer lose to Sunday Silence.
Orb also was the second Derby starter for both Janney and Phipps, whose previous entries were in 1988 and '89. Their family wealth allows them to race the horses they breed, unlike the majority of current owners who are involved through partnerships that split up the exorbitant costs of the sport.
The cousins' grandfather, Henry Phipps, founded wealth management firm Bessemer Trust in 1907. Janney serves as chairman, while Dinny Phipps is its director. He also chairs The Jockey Club, the sport's governing body that registers thoroughbreds, while Janney is vice chairman.
Yesterday Instagram added tagging to their service, so you can identify friends who are in your photos. Facebook and even Google+ have had this for a while, and it's fine. What I really want, however, is in-network sharing. The ability to share great Instagrams on Instagram.
On Twitter, if a friend tweets something amazing, I can re-tweet on Twitter, and the people who follow me can discover it. On Google+, if a friend posts something amazing, I can share it on G+, and the people who follow me can likewise discover it. Many other social services have similar features. Friends retweeting or sharing within the network is how we all find new and interesting people to add within those networks. It's the easiest, simplest way to grow.
On Instagram, I can Like amazing photos, but I can't share them with my friends on Instagram. If @safesolvent hits "The Stance" on top of the most spectacular cliff imaginable, or @davidlundbladphotography captures the perfect fashion candid, I have no ability to let anyone else on Instagram experience it with me -- I have to use the built-in feature to share to Facebook or Twitter, or manually share to G+ or other services.
In-network sharing is such a common social feature that Instagram certainly must have considered it, and must have gotten the request for it multiple times. Their vision for the service may not align with sharing, or they may not yet be ready to introduce it the way they want to.
Still, it's something I'd love to see, and sooner rather than later. There's so much amazing work on Instagram, it's a shame it can't be shared on Instagram. Let me know what you think, either in the comments below or on Instagram
Two Iranians accused by Israel of planning to target its citizens in East Africa face 15 years in a Kenyan prison after they were found guilty of plotting a terror attack.
Ahmad Mohammed and Sayed Mousavi had 33 pounds of powerful explosives they intended either to use themselves or to give to others preparing bombings, a senior Kenyan judge ruled on Thursday.
The two men were arrested last June outside a five-star Libyan-owned hotel in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, after an eight-day surveillance operation.
Intelligence agents trailed the pair as they appeared to scout for targets including the British High Commission, the Israeli embassy, and a nearby synagogue.
RECOMMENDED: Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.
They also allegedly made contact with a Kenyan man living in the port city of Mombasa who was known to have links to Al Qaeda in Somalia
Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Mousavi made several trips to Kenya?s coast during the week before they were arrested.
Within hours being taken into custody, they were flown from Nairobi to Mombasa where they led investigators to where they had hidden 33 pounds of RDX explosives in two grey rucksacks on the edge of a golf course.
RDX is more powerful than TNT and Kenyan police told the men?s trial that the amount found would have been enough to bring down a multi-story building.
Detectives fear that the original consignment that the men allegedly brought from Iran was 220 pounds and that most of it has yet to be found.
"I have no doubt in my mind that they were part of the group that placed explosives there," Kiarie Wa Kiarie, the presiding magistrate, told the court in Nairobi. "I must appreciate our Kenyan security personnel for detecting and taking swift action to stop the catastrophe and ensure our country was safe.?
Kenya was hit by a spate of bombings and attacks last year, which the Nairobi government mostly blamed on Somalia?s Al Shebab army that Kenyan forces were fighting inside Somalia.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, claimed that Mohammed and Mousavi were members of the elite Al Quds division of Iran?s Revolutionary Guards and were planning attacks on Israelis in East Africa.
"Iranian terrorism knows no borders," he said at the time. "The international community must fight against this major player in the world of terrorism."
Israel said Iranian agents were also behind an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Saudi Arabia?s ambassador to Washington, and other plots in Thailand, India, and Azerbaijan.
Analysts believe each mission was to be carried out by Al Quds agents as part of a retaliation program against Israel following the deaths in recent years of five Iranian scientists with links to Tehran's nuclear program.
Mohamed and Mousavi will be sentenced on Monday. They face up to 15 years in jail.
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The day NASA's Fermi dodged a 1.5-ton bulletPublic release date: 1-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Francis Reddy Francis.j.reddy@nasa.gov 301-286-4453 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Maneuvering a satellite to avoid a space collision
NASA scientists don't often learn that their spacecraft is at risk of crashing into another satellite. But when Julie McEnery, the project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, checked her email on March 29, 2012, she found herself facing this precise situation.
While Fermi is in fine shape today, continuing its mission to map the highest-energy light in the universe, the story of how it sidestepped a potential disaster offers a glimpse at an underappreciated aspect of managing a space mission: orbital traffic control.
As McEnery worked through her inbox, an automatically generated report arrived from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. On scanning the document, she discovered that Fermi was just one week away from an unusually close encounter with Cosmos 1805, a defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War.
The two objects, speeding around Earth at thousands of miles an hour in nearly perpendicular orbits, were expected to miss each other by a mere 700 feet.
"My immediate reaction was, 'Whoa, this is different from anything we've seen before!'" McEnery recalled.
Although the forecast indicated a close call, satellite operators have learned the hard way that they can't be too careful. The uncertainties in predicting spacecraft positions a week into the future can be much larger than the distances forecast for their closest approach.
This was most dramatically demonstrated on Feb. 10, 2009, when a study revealed that Cosmos 2251, a dead Russian communications satellite, would pass about 1,900 feet from the functioning Iridium 33 communications satellite later in the day. At the predicted time of closest approach, all contact with Iridium 33 was lost. Radar revealed clouds of debris traveling along the orbits of both spacecraft, confirming the first known satellite-to-satellite collision.
That crash generated thousands of fragments large enough to be tracked and many smaller pieces that evade detection. Much of the wreckage remains a hazard to operating spacecraft because only about 20 percent of the trackable pieces have reentered the atmosphere.
With a speed relative to Fermi of 27,000 mph, a direct hit by the 3,100-pound Cosmos 1805 would release as much energy as two and a half tons of high explosives, destroying both spacecraft.
Despite the apparent crowding in Earth orbit, there's usually a vast amount of space between individual objects. Close approaches -- also known as conjunctions -- with fragments, rocket bodies and active payloads remain infrequent events. Moreover, few of the potential conjunctions identified a week into the future will actually materialize.
"It's similar to forecasting rain at a specific time and place a week in advance," said Goddard's Eric Stoneking, the attitude control lead engineer for Fermi. "As the date approaches, uncertainties in the prediction decrease and the initial picture may change dramatically."
Twice before, the Fermi team had been alerted to potential conjunctions, and on both occasions the threats evaporated. It was possible the Cosmos 1805 encounter would vanish as well, and the spacecraft's observations could continue without interruption.
But the update on Friday, March 30, indicated otherwise. The satellites would occupy the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of each other.
"It was clear we had to be ready to move Fermi out of the way, and that's when I alerted our Flight Dynamics Team that we were planning a maneuver," McEnery said.
The only way to accomplish this was by firing thrusters designed to ensure that Fermi would never pose a threat to another satellite. Intended for use at the end of Fermi's operating life, the thrusters were designed to take it out of orbit and allow it burn up in the atmosphere.
Because a failure of this system, such as a propellant leak or an explosion, could have ended Fermi's mission prematurely, the thrusters had never been tested, adding a new source of anxiety for McEnery.
"You can't help but be nervous thinking about highly flammable fluids heading down pipes they'd never flowed down before," she said. "But having done this, we now know the system works as designed, and it gives us confidence should we need to maneuver again in the future."
The Goddard CARA team determined how big a push Fermi would need to mitigate the threat. Working with the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, CARA scientists also checked that the projected new orbit wouldn't put Fermi on course for a conjunction with another object. The Flight Operations Team selected possible times for the primary maneuver and, just in case, up to three additional ones.
Over the weekend, the radar and optical sensors of the U.S. Space Surveillance Network continued keeping tabs on Cosmos 1805 and every other artificial object larger than 4 inches across in Earth orbit. Of the 17,000 objects currently tracked, only about 7 percent are active satellites.
Once each day, JSpOC analyzes the updated orbits, looks for possible conjunctions a week or more into the future, and notifies the Goddard CARA team of any events involving NASA's robotic missions. Another group at NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston performs the same function for all spacecraft carrying astronauts, including the International Space Station.
By Tuesday, April 3, the threat still had not receded and all plans were in place for firing Fermi's thrusters.
Shortly after noon EDT, the spacecraft stopped scanning the sky and oriented itself along its direction of travel. It then parked its solar panels and tucked away its high-gain antenna to protect them from the thruster exhaust.
"The maneuver, which was performed by the spacecraft itself based on procedures we developed a long time ago, was very simple, just firing all thrusters for one second," Stoneking explained. "There was a lot of suspense and tension leading up to it, but once it was over, we just sighed with relief that it all went well."
By 1 p.m., Fermi was back to doing science. A few hours later, the various teams met to evaluate the results of the maneuver and determine if another would be required. When the two spacecraft reached their long-awaited conjunction the following day, they would miss by a comfortable margin of 6 miles, with no further actions needed.
"A huge weight was lifted," McEnery said. "I felt like I'd lost 20 pounds."
Last year, the Goddard CARA team participated in collision-avoidance maneuvers for seven other missions. A month before the Fermi conjunction came to light, Landsat 7 dodged pieces of Fengyun-1C, a Chinese weather satellite deliberately destroyed in 2007 as part of a military test. And in May and October, respectively, NASA's Aura and CALIPSO Earth-observing satellites took steps to avoid fragments from Cosmos 2251.
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The day NASA's Fermi dodged a 1.5-ton bulletPublic release date: 1-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Francis Reddy Francis.j.reddy@nasa.gov 301-286-4453 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Maneuvering a satellite to avoid a space collision
NASA scientists don't often learn that their spacecraft is at risk of crashing into another satellite. But when Julie McEnery, the project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, checked her email on March 29, 2012, she found herself facing this precise situation.
While Fermi is in fine shape today, continuing its mission to map the highest-energy light in the universe, the story of how it sidestepped a potential disaster offers a glimpse at an underappreciated aspect of managing a space mission: orbital traffic control.
As McEnery worked through her inbox, an automatically generated report arrived from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. On scanning the document, she discovered that Fermi was just one week away from an unusually close encounter with Cosmos 1805, a defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War.
The two objects, speeding around Earth at thousands of miles an hour in nearly perpendicular orbits, were expected to miss each other by a mere 700 feet.
"My immediate reaction was, 'Whoa, this is different from anything we've seen before!'" McEnery recalled.
Although the forecast indicated a close call, satellite operators have learned the hard way that they can't be too careful. The uncertainties in predicting spacecraft positions a week into the future can be much larger than the distances forecast for their closest approach.
This was most dramatically demonstrated on Feb. 10, 2009, when a study revealed that Cosmos 2251, a dead Russian communications satellite, would pass about 1,900 feet from the functioning Iridium 33 communications satellite later in the day. At the predicted time of closest approach, all contact with Iridium 33 was lost. Radar revealed clouds of debris traveling along the orbits of both spacecraft, confirming the first known satellite-to-satellite collision.
That crash generated thousands of fragments large enough to be tracked and many smaller pieces that evade detection. Much of the wreckage remains a hazard to operating spacecraft because only about 20 percent of the trackable pieces have reentered the atmosphere.
With a speed relative to Fermi of 27,000 mph, a direct hit by the 3,100-pound Cosmos 1805 would release as much energy as two and a half tons of high explosives, destroying both spacecraft.
Despite the apparent crowding in Earth orbit, there's usually a vast amount of space between individual objects. Close approaches -- also known as conjunctions -- with fragments, rocket bodies and active payloads remain infrequent events. Moreover, few of the potential conjunctions identified a week into the future will actually materialize.
"It's similar to forecasting rain at a specific time and place a week in advance," said Goddard's Eric Stoneking, the attitude control lead engineer for Fermi. "As the date approaches, uncertainties in the prediction decrease and the initial picture may change dramatically."
Twice before, the Fermi team had been alerted to potential conjunctions, and on both occasions the threats evaporated. It was possible the Cosmos 1805 encounter would vanish as well, and the spacecraft's observations could continue without interruption.
But the update on Friday, March 30, indicated otherwise. The satellites would occupy the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of each other.
"It was clear we had to be ready to move Fermi out of the way, and that's when I alerted our Flight Dynamics Team that we were planning a maneuver," McEnery said.
The only way to accomplish this was by firing thrusters designed to ensure that Fermi would never pose a threat to another satellite. Intended for use at the end of Fermi's operating life, the thrusters were designed to take it out of orbit and allow it burn up in the atmosphere.
Because a failure of this system, such as a propellant leak or an explosion, could have ended Fermi's mission prematurely, the thrusters had never been tested, adding a new source of anxiety for McEnery.
"You can't help but be nervous thinking about highly flammable fluids heading down pipes they'd never flowed down before," she said. "But having done this, we now know the system works as designed, and it gives us confidence should we need to maneuver again in the future."
The Goddard CARA team determined how big a push Fermi would need to mitigate the threat. Working with the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, CARA scientists also checked that the projected new orbit wouldn't put Fermi on course for a conjunction with another object. The Flight Operations Team selected possible times for the primary maneuver and, just in case, up to three additional ones.
Over the weekend, the radar and optical sensors of the U.S. Space Surveillance Network continued keeping tabs on Cosmos 1805 and every other artificial object larger than 4 inches across in Earth orbit. Of the 17,000 objects currently tracked, only about 7 percent are active satellites.
Once each day, JSpOC analyzes the updated orbits, looks for possible conjunctions a week or more into the future, and notifies the Goddard CARA team of any events involving NASA's robotic missions. Another group at NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston performs the same function for all spacecraft carrying astronauts, including the International Space Station.
By Tuesday, April 3, the threat still had not receded and all plans were in place for firing Fermi's thrusters.
Shortly after noon EDT, the spacecraft stopped scanning the sky and oriented itself along its direction of travel. It then parked its solar panels and tucked away its high-gain antenna to protect them from the thruster exhaust.
"The maneuver, which was performed by the spacecraft itself based on procedures we developed a long time ago, was very simple, just firing all thrusters for one second," Stoneking explained. "There was a lot of suspense and tension leading up to it, but once it was over, we just sighed with relief that it all went well."
By 1 p.m., Fermi was back to doing science. A few hours later, the various teams met to evaluate the results of the maneuver and determine if another would be required. When the two spacecraft reached their long-awaited conjunction the following day, they would miss by a comfortable margin of 6 miles, with no further actions needed.
"A huge weight was lifted," McEnery said. "I felt like I'd lost 20 pounds."
Last year, the Goddard CARA team participated in collision-avoidance maneuvers for seven other missions. A month before the Fermi conjunction came to light, Landsat 7 dodged pieces of Fengyun-1C, a Chinese weather satellite deliberately destroyed in 2007 as part of a military test. And in May and October, respectively, NASA's Aura and CALIPSO Earth-observing satellites took steps to avoid fragments from Cosmos 2251.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
May 1 (Reuters) - Post position for Saturday's 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs after Wednesday's draw (listed as barrier, HORSE, jockey, trainer) 1. BLACK ONYX, Joe Bravo, Kelly Breen 2. OXBOW, Gary Stevens, D. Wayne Lukas 3. REVOLUTIONARY, Calvin Borel, Todd Pletcher 4. GOLDEN SOUL, Robby Albarado, Dallas Stewart 5. NORMANDY INVASION, Javier Castellano, Chad Brown 6. MYLUTE, Rosie Napravnik, Tom Amoss 7. GIANT FINISH, Jose Espinoza, Tony Dutrow 8. GOLDENCENTS, Kevin Krigger, Doug O'Neill 9. OVERANALYZE, Rafael Bejarano, Todd Pletcher 10. PALACE MALICE, Mike Smith, Todd Pletcher 11. ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve's debate over monetary policy could begin to shift away from the prospect of reducing stimulus toward a discussion about doing more, given the signs of economic weakness and slowing inflation.
But officials are not there yet, and that wariness has been sensed by financial markets, where the dollar has retreated in recent days and bond yields have declined in anticipation that the central bank will keep the policy pedal to the metal.
At a two-day meeting that wraps up on Wednesday, the Fed is widely expected to maintain its monthly purchases of $85 billion in bonds to support an economic recovery that is nearly four years old but still too weak for the job market to truly heal.
With the central bank's favored inflation gauge slipping and employment growth faltering, policymakers could again find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to shift from talk of curbing stimulus to the possibility of doing more.
Currently, analysts see the Fed buying a total $1 trillion in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities during the ongoing third round of quantitative easing, known as QE3. Until recently, analysts had believed the Fed would start taking the foot off the accelerator in the second half of the year.
Now, things are looking a bit more shaky.
"Expectations for tapering off of the Fed's outcome-based purchases have been pushed back due to recent softening in the economic data," according to a report from the private sector Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, released on Wednesday.
The housing market continues to show signs of strength, with home prices posting their biggest yearly gain since 2006, the year the market began a historic slide that snowballed into a global financial crisis.
However, the industrial sector is not quite as perky. Durable goods orders posted their largest drop in seven months in March, while an index of Midwest manufacturing showed an unexpected contraction in the sector for April.
That trend was reinforced by a key report from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) on Wednesday.
Its index for national factory activity fell to 50.7 in April from 51.3 the month before, coming in under expectations for a 50.9 print.
A reading above 50 indicates expansion. The report provides an early indications of the economy's current state of health.
In an ill omen for the April U.S. jobs report, due on Friday, the ISM employment index fell to 50.2 from 54.2. Earlier, the monthly ADP National Employment Report showed that U.S. private employers added 119,00 jobs in April, well under expectations for a gain of 150,000 jobs.
Economic growth did rebound in the first quarter after a dismal end to 2012, but the 2.5 percent annual rate of expansion fell short of economists' estimates, and economists are already penciling in a weaker second quarter.
At the same time, inflation has steadily been coming down. The Fed's preferred measure of core inflation, which excludes more volatile food and energy costs, rose just 1.1 percent in the year to March. Overall inflation was up just 1 percent, the smallest gain in 3-1/2 years.
The Fed targets inflation of 2 percent.
CHECKING THE TOOLKIT
Despite the economy's softer tone, a wait-and-see attitude seems the most likely approach for now. The Fed is expected to nod to the economy's disappointing performance when it announces its decision at 2 p.m. (1800 GMT), even as it maintains its course.
But if the economy's fortunes do not improve, the U.S. central bank may well look for fresh ways to boost its support to the economy -- increasing the amount of assets it is buying is just one option.
The Fed could announce an intent to hold the bonds it has bought until maturity instead of selling them when the time comes to tighten monetary policy. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has already raised this as a possibility.
Central bankers could also set a lower unemployment threshold to signal when the time might be ripe to finally raise overnight interest rates, which they have held near zero since December 2008. Currently, the threshold stands at 6.5 percent, provided inflation does not threaten to breach 2.5 percent.
Research suggests such "forward guidance" about the future path of interest rates can have a strong impact on current borrowing costs, and one Fed official -- Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank -- has already suggested lowering the threshold to give the economy a boost.
"Forward guidance would be perceived as having lower costs (than bond purchases) by most, I think, and for that reason I think it could be the preferred avenue, especially if more stimulus was projected to be needed for a long period of time," said Roberto Perli, a partner at Cornerstone Macro in Washington and a former Fed economist.
Analysts generally agree that is a debate for the future, if the Fed even gets there at all.
Victor Li, a former regional Fed economist who teaches at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said employment growth would have to be consistently below the 100,000 jobs per month pace in combination with core inflation of around 1 percent for the Fed to consider a greater easing of monetary policy.
"There is just no evidence that this is going to happen."
Others are less sanguine. Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan's Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, said the risk that prices will drop persistently, causing further economic damage, cannot be ruled out.
"What's more relevant than the current inflation trend is what this means for forecast inflation," Wolfers said. "And I think even more relevant than the Fed's official point estimate for inflation is the probability that deflation looms as a real threat. Inflation rates lower than 1 percent certainly raise a greater risk of deflation."
(Additional reporting by Alister Bull; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Andrea Ricci)
Harmonic Proportion and Form in Nature, Art and Architecture (Popular Science) book download
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"From Prison to Success" "Make a Choice, Make a Change... Make a difference (part two of two) read e-book School Success for Kids With Asperger's Syndrome: A Practical Guide for Parents and Teachers
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