Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

McClatchy: Fed Interest Earnings Approach $100 Billion

Fed’s interest earnings approach $100b WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve said Friday it transferred a record $96.9 billion to the U.S. treasury in 2014, profits on its unprecedented $4.4 trillion in holdings designed to support the U.S. economy in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Returning to a topic I have raised a few times […]

Adding to Steve’s quest to define “money”. A couple short films.

Via Digby comes a couple short films talking about what is money.   They are part of an effort by a group/site called We The Economy that has 20 short films aimed:  to drive awareness and establish a better understanding of the U.S. economy. Told through animation, comedy, musical, non-fiction, and scripted films, WE THE ECONOMY […]

Anyone got a number? For ‘Real Debt Service of Public Debt as % of GDP’

And this is an honest question, one that I have been poking around in but maybe don’t have the chops to answer. Lets take three measures of Public Debt: One nominal. Public Debt as of the 16th was $17.899 trillion. And rising. Two as percentage of GDP. And BTW the preferred measure of deficit fetishists […]

How the Fed Cornered the Long Bond

Fed Treasury Holdings 5-7-2014 The above link should take you to a PDF showing the Fed’s System Open Market Accounts holdings of Treasury Bonds and Notes which the second link will tell you comprise $2.224 trillion of the total $4.017 trillion of SOMA Holdings, with that total including $1.631 trillion of Fannie and Freddie Mac […]

U.S. Federal Intergenerational Debt: Rendered and Layered

It is a common trope among Austerians that the U.S. is passing on unsustainable debt to our children and grandchildren. And certainly there are some scary numbers out there, for example “$17.4 trillion!!” A very real number. But maybe it would be useful to render that number down so as to calculate real incidence of […]

Fed Treasury Holdings, ‘Real Debt’ and ‘Real Debt Service’

It is not difficult to determine a dollar figure for Total U.S. Public Debt. In fact you have to round UP from the Treasury’s Debt to the Penny and Who Holds it web application which tracks that number daily. As of end of business Thursday that total was $17,472,051,696,926.14. Which is a lot of money […]

Release of transcripts of 2007 Fed meetings

A note from Wonkblog For anybody who cares about how the country ended up in this precarious economic state, a very big day is coming soon, as information that has been under lock and key for the past five years will be shared with the world.  The Federal Reserve keeps transcripts of its meetings to […]

One question for Ben Bernanke

by Mike Kimel The other day Ben Bernanke gave a speech in which he asked and answered five questions about the Fed: 1. What are the Fed’s objectives, and how is it trying to meet them?2. What’s the relationship between the Fed’s monetary policy and thefiscal decisions of the Administration and the Congress?3. What is the […]