by Mike Kimel The Fed, Primary Dealers, and the Ineffectiveness of Monetary Policy The Federal Reserve’s primary tool for monetary policy is buying or selling securities, in particularly US notes, bills and bonds. But… it doesn’t buy and sell bonds to you and me. Instead, it deals with primary dealers – the complete list is […]
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 […]
Peter Dorman at Econospeak brings us another reminder about policy decisions on the economy. Reposted from Econospeak: The Main Point Macroeconomics is complicated and political economy is devilish, so it is easy to get lost in the details. From time to time, it’s good to come up for air—to remember what the fundamental issue is. […]
by Mike Kimel Update …Since this post has gotten a lot of attention, jump here for myfinal word on this topic. I’m sure I’m missing something here, because Paul Krugman is so often extremely perceptive, but I think here he is very, very wrong. He writes: The naive (or deliberately misleading) version of Fed policy […]
One of the nice things about the Kauffman Foundation’s Blogger Conference is the time to let the mind wander and look at data after having your brain scoured. One of the worst things is realizing too late that you’ve got a Really Ugly Graphic, and most of the people who could help with it are […]
Tim Duy body-slams St. Louis FRB President James Bullard: Estimates of potential GDP are not simple extrapolations of actual GDP from the peak of the last business cycles. They are estimates of the maximum sustainable output given fully employed resources. The backbone of the CBO’s estimates is a Solow Growth model. So I don’t think […]
The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia: We have been putting out credit in a period of depression, when it is not wanted and could not be used, and will have to withdraw credit when it is wanted and can be used. But this is not Charles I. Plosser, no matter how similar […]
by Rebecca Wilder The ECB is Plugging Holes Today the ECB released its monthly data on monetary developments in the Euro area (EA), as measured by M3 and its components. The market usually focuses on the marketable assets portion of M3, M3-M2, as a representation of funding access – here’s an FT Alphaville post highlighting […]
by Mike Kimel In this post, I will show that during the New Deal era, changes in the real economic growth rate can be explained almost entirely by the earlier changes in federal government’s non-defense spending. There are going to be a lot of words at first – but if you’re the impatient type, feel […]
by Mike Kimel Scaling to New Depths* with Scott Sumner I’ve been having a bit of back and forth with Scott Sumner. Here is his latest post, helpfully entitled: “A suggestion for Mike Kimel.” His key suggestion: “Please take a close look at the data from the Great Depression, before doing more posts claiming I […]