Federal Reserve

Archive for Federal Reserve

Caitlin Long: Vulnerability of Fed’s Balance Sheet

Caitlin Long, head of Corporate Strategies at Morgan Stanley, shared a report they have distributed to their clients. (She gave permission for me to quote from it.) Caitlin is a former student from my Mises Academy classes, and was one of the first people Carlos and I interviewed in our Lara-Murphy Report. Here’s Caitlin: * […]

“If the Fed Ever Started Monetizing the Debt, We’d Be in Trouble…”

The CBO recently revised its estimate of the FY2013 deficit down to “only” $642 billion. The Fed is still buying $45 billion per month in Treasury securities, on average. So that means the Fed will monetize 84% of the Treasury’s deficit this fiscal year. And it’s not chump change, the deficit is still over half […]

Noah Smith Shows the Power of Framing

Noah puts “austerians” on the couch: [M]aybe people like the idea of austerity because they think an economic stagnation is our best chance to address what they perceive to be our long-term challenges. Allowing a crisis might be less terrible than wasting it. Now, when stated that way, the idea sounds kind of silly – […]

Potpourri

==> An interesting story of a professor who purposely let his class “cheat” on a Game Theory exam in order to teach game theory. ==> Can’t remember if I already linked to this: The formal details of my June 3 debate with Warren Mosler, at Columbia University, moderated by John Carney of CNBC. (Yes it’s […]

Applying Krugmanian Lessons to the 1990s

Poor Alex Tabarrok. He makes a simple blog post, pointing out the hilarious heads-we-win-tails-you-lose stance of Krugman et al., and the targets of his critique focus on something completely incidental. I will probably muddy the waters myself by focusing on the “incidental” part of his post, but so be it. First, though, let’s review: 1) […]

Why Economists Will Soon Be Lynched

I am going to accelerate my transition into stand-up comedy, because the public is going to turn on economists very, very soon. Look at this: 1) Krugman argues that severe US fiscal austerity explains our dismal economic growth. 2) I say no, there hasn’t been fiscal austerity. In fact, we have record-high spending, and that […]

Krugman Gloating on Gold

This really makes no sense. As everybody knows, gold just had the biggest one-day drop in three decades. Here’s Krugman’s reaction: So, the slide in gold has turned into a rout. As Joe Weisenthal says, this should be seen as really good news, because it offers strong evidence that the goldbug/inflationista view of the world […]

DeLong Flirts With Notion That Stimulus Efforts Thus Far Have Gained Nothing on the Margin

It’s ironic. In this lengthy essay, Brad DeLong is obviously arguing about the urgent need for more stimulus. Yet he tries so hard that he achieves the opposite result he intended. (Sort of like me on the dating scene in college.) Here’s DeLong: In the 12 years of the Great Depression – between the stock-market […]