Brad DeLong’s famous rule (Originally: “If you think Paul Krugman must be wrong, you severely overestimated Niall Ferguson“) needs a corollary. If Olivier Blanchard says your macroeconomic policy doesn’t work, and that you should double your inflation target to make it reasonable, it’s worth trying: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist, Olivier Blanchard, says central […]
Bruce Bartlett: The Fed has talked openly about new procedures to soak up the bank reserves it has created even as those reserves remain largely idle and unlent. You don’t get inflation if there is no money multiplier in play. So long as the banks are just holding the cash, worries about monetary policy leading […]
Tyler Cowen can count: In sum, maybe three percent expected inflation conflicts with the desire to rapidly recapitalize banks through maintaining a wide interest rate spread. Maybe we need that zero nominal short rate or at least the Fed thinks we do…. I also regard this as a somewhat gruesome hypothesis. It means that “Main […]
Rahm Emanuel accidentally Tells the Truth and Shames the Devil: “We have to get them off the sidelines and get them to play a more active role in our economic recovery,” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said on Sunday. “They play an essential role in helping the economy grow.” Gosh, the Administration […]
We are now almost 24 months into the Great Recession. While many expect NBER will eventually say that The Great Recession ended several months ago, they have not yet. By contrast, the recession that began The Great Depression, per NBER, lasted 43 months. It seems only fair to compare the two, so I trust I […]
As I am arguing on the same side as Henry Kaufman, and against the kind-hearted Mark Thoma, does the phrase “left-of-center” at the top of this blog have as much Memory Meaning as the Suzanne Vega song from Pretty in Pink? Kaufman: During the Greenspan years (1987-2006), the Fed clearly failed to recognize the significance […]
Ken Houghton, having realized there is still a Commercial Paper market, looks at one implication of it. One of the things that gets ignored in all the fussing about government debt is how small it is by comparison to corporate debt. The shortest-term debt, Commercial Paper, can be very interesting. With a maturity that is […]
by Rebecca There is no shortage of speeches by US central bankers these days. The following is an excerpt from a NY Times article that highlights the debate among key Fed officials about the speed and method of stimulus withdrawal once the decision to exit has been made: Mr. Bernanke and other officials want to […]
by Rebecca Ex post, it is obvious that the Fed was way too tight in the second half of 2008. To be sure, the FOMC was actively engaged in its standard easing policies; however, the Fed got the Treasury to aid in its sterilization efforts, and later the Fed fast-tracked the interest on reserves (IOR) […]
by Rebecca(cross posted at Newsneconomics) Prof. Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser (thanks Mark Thoma for the link) addresses one of the Fed’s standard methods of draining liquidity from the banking system: reverse repurchase agreements. Basically, the Fed will transfer some of its assets to the banking system via short-term loans taken out with its Primary Dealers, […]