Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

Market Monetarists: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Actually my title doesn’t really make sense; I couldn’t think of anything clever. I really liked this David Beckworth post, talking about the breakdown of the Fed’s “floor system.” In fact, I liked it so much that I based my article in the forthcoming issue of The Lara-Murphy Report on it. So score +1 for […]

The Myth of Fed Independence

My latest article is feisty. It sounds like I’m defending Trump and then…BAM! I go full Rothbard. Trump committed a faux pas with his public complaints about the Fed. But his actual “mistake” was in letting the American people in on a dirty secret: The central bank is by its very nature a political institution […]

Scott Sumner Slips

Long-time readers know that I am not a fan of Scott Sumner’s signature idea, namely that the Great Recession was caused by Ben Bernanke’s tight monetary policy. However, if you’re really an expert on my writings, you’ll know that I’ve said Sumner would be a very formidable debating opponent–much more than Krugman. Indeed, when I […]

Am I Just a Permabear?

In the comments of this post, Gene Callahan doesn’t shirk his duty of constantly assuming I started reading financial economics last Tuesday: But Bob, weren’t you predicting market disaster when the Dow was at 6000? (I was buying at that point, fwiw.) Weren’t you predicting it through the whole rise of the last seven years? […]

Treasury Yield Curve Over the Last Year

This might be useful to some of you: It’s obvious in the above that the Fed action has raised very short term rates while bringing down longer rates. (To explain some of the movements earlier, remember that markets thought the Fed was first going to raise the fed funds target in September, and then it […]

The Fed’s Magic Trick Won’t Work

Hit and Run on Sumner

We have a super duper awesome conference this weekend here at the Free Market Institute, so I have to be brief. Let me first motivate this post by issuing the following statement, to which I want you to react: *** Ten-year bond yields have plummeted to 1.83%, from about 2.2% when the Fed “raised” interest […]

*Free Advice* Readers Know Why Monetary Base Is Down

Dennis Gartman is warning people that the monetary base is sharply down. That seems odd, since the Fed hasn’t been selling assets, right? It’s the same thing that we figured out (due to helpful comments from two of our readers) regarding reserves: Bank reserves count as part of the monetary base. So when the Fed’s […]