I want to thank all the commenters on my last post — at Angry Bear, at Asymptosis, and at Mike Norman’s blog. You’ve provided me with exactly the education I hoped to achieve. Here’s hoping others benefited similarly. I asked: what would happen if the the Fed cut the interest rate on reserves from its […]

Sort of lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts: Rick Santorum has no use for the Ivy League, or the economists produced therein. (He also expressed doubts about the Republican reliance on economists from the “Australian school.”(Johannas von Quiggin take note) Likely he meant the “Austrian school”. Read more here . Uh. … this isn’t one of […]

The good doctor quotes the Paper of Record: Garages near Yankee Stadium, built over the objections of Bronx neighbors appalled at losing parkland for yet more parking lots, turn out never to be more than 60 percent full, even on game days. The city has lost public space, the developers have lost a fortune. and […]

The employment report shows signs of an improved employment situation, but on balance it looks like more of the same. The unemployment rate fell 0.2 points to 8.5%. This continues the recent trend of a falling unemployment rate. But the drop was also driven by anther 50,000 drop in thelabor force. But the increase in […]

by Rebecca Wilder Fractional Money Multipliers Money multipliers – the stock of money divided by a measure of base money (generally reserves plus currency in circulation) – are dwindling to fractions of what they used to be. FT Alphaville draws our attention to this fact on the Euro area (EA) using SocGen’s analysis. The money […]

Here I thought I was fed up with the Empty Suit in the White House: What it says to me is all that matters is Obama’s reelection (see, for example, the pivot to deficit reduction) — when the timing’s right for that, things will happen — but don’t keep your fingers crossed otherwise. If you […]

I’m still in catch-up mode, but I keep coming back to this presentation (PDF)—four times now. It’s a speech by BoJ member Masaaki Shirakawa in Tokyo on the 22nd of December last year to the Board of Councillors of Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), entitled “Globalization and population aging – challenges facing Japan.” Go through […]

For the non-cognoscenti: “IOR” is interest on reserves. Banks keep money in their accounts at the Fed. In October, 2008 the Fed started paying .25% interest on those accounts. The Fed’s also engaged in “quantitative easing,” a.k.a. open-market purchases on steroids, creating new money and using it to buy $1.6 trillion dollars worth of bonds […]

In the previous post, I suggested that speculation is driving oil prices higher than they should be.  In this follow-up, I think I can show that oil prices are not behaving in a completely supply-demand determined way.  We’ll look at price activity, volatility, and an estimate of what rational pricing might be. First, here is […]