Paul Krugman writes about GE’s announcement to get out of the finance business. Why are they getting out? Financial reform from the Dodd-Frank legislation that includes “greater oversight, higher capital and liquidity requirements, etc.” Paul Krugman says… “And sure enough, what GE is in effect saying is that if we have to compete on a […]

Today the IMF published a short video with Christine Lagarde about avoiding the “New Mediocre”. My view is that carefully raising interest rates in the US will help raise the standard for productivity getting us eventually out of this “New Mediocre”. What do the readers of Angry Bear suggest is the answer? Leave ideas in […]

I read Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke and others. They mention two reasons why some people are calling for interest rates to rise… Possibility of Inflation Possibility of Financial instability Now I would like interest rates to rise, but I have never seen any inflation coming. In fact, it seems that inflation will stay low when […]

There is discourse in the econoblogosphere currently about why interest rates are low and may stay low for a long time. Larry Summers says that we may even have a negative natural real rate at full employment, even though Ben Bernanke sees that as somewhat impossible. It is fairly common knowledge that excess debt and […]

I have been upset with Paul Krugman for years since he undermined the living wage movement in the 1990’s. Here is what he wrote back then… “In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are […]

Alice Rivlin has a wonderful speech about Fiscal & Monetary Policy in a Post-inflation World. Her basic point among many keen insights is that financial instability should be more of a priority now than inflation. I agree with her. Monetary policy should focus on the wild beasts of the economy, not the domesticated pets. Inflation […]

If the Fed raises interest rates and marginal companies are pushed into struggling for survival, is this a bad thing? Won’t we lose jobs? Won’t wages be hurt? Well, the question is… Are the healthier companies (those that can better survive a higher Fed rate) willing to make employees happier? Well, we now have a […]

The Flow of Funds report from the Federal Reserve came out today for the 4th quarter of 2014. Non-financial business debt grew quite fast. “Non-financial business debt rose at an annual rate of 7.2 percent in the fourth quarter, a somewhat larger increase than in the previous quarter. As in recent years, corporate bonds accounted […]

The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, John Williams, gave a presentation on March 5th about the outlook for monetary policy. He basically is easing our understanding towards accepting the rationale for normalizing (raising) nominal interest rates. I personally am in agreement with what he says and how he says it. He […]