Following the release of the video of Romney denouncing (among other things) the fact that 47% of US households don’t pay positive US Federal Income Taxes many normally reliable commentators have argued that this is a break from the long Republican tradition of advocating tax cuts for the working poor to make work pay. I […]
One side has no point. I have mentioned from time to time the repeated Gallup polls showing strong support for tax progressivity. this is not a new phenomenon, Gallup started asking the questions in 1992.I tend to give an almost worthless link to pollingreport.com but I have finally looked up a decent link There is […]
Adventures in cyberspace. My 15 year old daughter Kathy has to buy a TI-84 calculator for school. So she was on Amazon.com. We have recently semi moved and I didn’t exactly know the address where I am typing. I asked her if she knew our zip code. She said, “How […]
There is a perhaps strategically overstated disagreement among enthusiasts for QE III about how it might help. Woodford et al stress the importance of QE as a signal of precommitment to expansionary future conventional monetary policy which will act through short term interest rates when the FOMC will be inclined to raise them above the […]
The FOMC announces QE III !* To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee agreed today to increase policy accommodation by purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month. The Committee also […]
I have been trying to write a post on what could be achieved by Fed purchases of agency issued MBS. My only new point is that the MBS price that matters is the price paid to Fannie/Freddie/Ginnie not the price on the secondary market. That is, the price that matters is the price of new […]
In August I discussed the possibility that people were trying to use a bit of money to fiddle with the poll of polls. My hypothesis was that now that averages of polls are getting more attention than the well known polls taken alone (a reasonable change in emphasis) it is possible to make the average […]
Joe Gagnon has a nice blog which allows comments only by e-mail. He has a proposal in two parts Next week the Fed should promise to hold the prime mortgage rate below 3 percent for at least 12 months. It can do this by unlimited purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities. By giving people a fixed […]
I am generally skeptical about the importance of further QE in the USA, but I am definitely not skeptical about the effectiveness of the the leaked European Central Bank plan to purchase unlimited amounts of European Government debt. The reason is that there are government bonds over here which terrify investors. That means that the […]
I’m feeling lonely out on this limb, but I think I will defend Bernanke and criticize Woodford ((and admit I only read the concluding section and the first two sections on foreward guidance of his talk) *.pdf but no warning. Open it). Medium and long term Treasury rates are extraordinarily low. It seems to me that […]