Central Bank Autonomy Is Under Attack ... Current events in Cyprus and Turkey hammer home a point that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made in the memoirs he published in September 2007. Central bank independence, Greenspan said, is "not set in stone." Left unsaid was the fact that it should be. Against an ever-shifting political backdrop, monetary policy can provide a bedrock of economic certainty -- but only if central bankers can discharge their duties without fear of government interference. – Bloomberg

Dominant Social Theme: It's a kind of sacrilege to let a politician near a central bank.

Free-Market Analysis: Several news items on the central banking front. As we can see from the above news excerpt, Cyprus is making threatening noises regarding its monetary nexus.

President Nicos Anastasiades is, in fact, in the process of removing Governor Chrystalla Georghadji. Her husband is entangled in a lawsuit with Laiki Bank and Georghadji failed to disclose it. This makes her vulnerable to removal – and Anastasiades wants to do just that.

Meanwhile, US Fed head Janet Yellen rendered the bank's latest momentous decision on interest rates on Wednesday after a Federal Open Market Committee meeting, and the verdict was remarkably ... mixed.

Or as the Drudge Report put it in a lead headline ... "Confusion."

Yellen and the others chose to remove the word "patience" from a rhetorical summation of the state of the economy. By removing the word, Yellen was indicating that an interest rate hike was closer than ever.

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