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 Mike Kimel A Simple Question about NGDP Targeting It seems that a big part of the econosphere these days talks about NGDP targeting. Translating this into English, a number of economists believe the Fed should be adjusting monetary policy to achieve a desired level of nominal GDP in any given year. To be very […]
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, without whose FRED database and Excel Add-in Economics Bloggers (and Matt Yglesias) would be Even More Boring, has been running a series of Discussions explaining why the Fed is incompetent—er, Why They Don’t Follow Their Dual Mandate—er, well, something about how They’re Doing The Best They Can.* The […]
A challenge for monetary authorities in a liquidity trap is that it is hard convince people that they won’t reverse expansionary policies as soon as the economy leaves the liquidity trap. The other problem is that they can’t do much other than affect expectations while the economy is in a liquidity trap. This suggests that […]
Barry Ritholtz points us to how essential US government intervention was for the banking system and in particular existing banks and the management at The Big Picture. It has links worth pursuing as well. I continue to be of the mind that the Wall Street Bailouts were misguided, and that a massive Swedish style reorg […]
Economists for Obama suddenly showed up in my RSS reader again. It’s not a pretty sight: I suppose I might change my mind, but after watching the President give in to the Boehner-McConnell blackmail axis, I don’t imagine I’ll be spending much of my time advocating his re-election. Assuming he’s the Democratic nominee, which I […]
Spent the morning at this event: presentations and discussion by Joe Stiglitz, Yves Smith, Mike Konczal, Joe Gagnon, Matt Yglesias, Tom Palley, and many others. Mike K. tole me he expects that video will be available this evening, at least of the speakers’s presentations. I plan to post at more length later; meanwhile, you can […]
Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture points to Pro Publica regarding Tarp and other bailout monies: Pro Publica has been maintaining a list of bailout recipients, updating the amount lent versus what was repaid. So far, 938 Recipients have had $607,822,512,238 dollars committed to them, with $553,918,968,267 disbursed. Of that $554b disbursed, less than half […]
This is actually good news, since everything else the Fed has done has been to benefit the insolvent large banks. Still, I didn’t expect my post of three days ago to be such a perfect “negative indicator” so soon.
Fortune published an op-ed piece by Keith R. McCullough at Hedgeye (h/t to my Mom). He argues (not very well, I might add) that QE2 is the doomsday scenario for “markets”. I’d like to point out the following (mostly because this is a common mistake): what the Fed announced is NOT QE2. Furthermore, the Fed’s […]