Federal Reserve

Archive for Federal Reserve

Potpourri

I’m still buried with “day job” work, but at this point I have so many tabs on my Firefox browser that it’s slowing me down. So this post is an investment in my future productivity, see. * Glenn Greenwald once again delivers a very fair assessment of the political culture. It’s really impressive that GG […]

Austrian Business Cycle Theory: Malinvestment, Not Overinvestment

Apropos of the recent flurry–the Austrians are apparently the Charlie Sheen of the blogosphere right now–here is an interesting quotation from Mises: The erroneous belief that the essential feature of the boom is overinvestment and not malinvestment is due to the habit of judging conditions merely according to what is perceptible and tangible. The observer […]

Heads Krugman Wins, Tails Hard Money Loses

I really am swamped with my “day job” for the next month or so, meaning blogging will be sparse. But at this point, I think someone needs to write Portrait of the Artist as a Keynesian Man. In this post, Krugman shows just how many degrees of freedom he has to work with: Some readers […]

The Financial Entangling Alliances Thicken

From CNBC: The world’s major central banks unleashed coordinated action Wednesday to ease the increasing strains on the global financial system, a move that sent stock markets up sharply. The European Central Bank, U.S. Federal Reserve [cnbc explains] , the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan, and Switzerland are all taking […]

The Fed and Big Bank Nexus

A reader sends me this interesting Bloomberg piece. It is a familiar story, but armed with some FOIA data, it spells out just how much the Fed bailed out the major banks and kept it all from Congress.

Krugman on Shaping Expectations

I’m not going to say this even qualifies as a “Kontradiction,” but it’s close. By now, every serious geeconosphere wonk should know that Paul Krugman’s recommendation to Japan back in the day, was that its central bank should credibly commit to future inflation. That would cause the public to expect a lower purchasing power of […]

Karl Smith’s Less-Than-Soothing Fed Exit Strategy

I truly enjoy reading Karl Smith’s posts over at Modeled Behavior. Karl might be second only to Steve Landsburg in terms of thinking about standard issues in novel ways. (For example, check out this post where Karl consciously walks headfirst into the liquidity trap, and becomes more powerful than Paul Krugman can possibly imagine.) So […]

Scott Sumner Sees Sumnerites Everywhere

Wow. Scott Sumner’s success has gone to his head so much that he thinks we’re all market monetarists now. In this post, Sumner first quotes from a news article about Bernanke: The Fed, he said, believes inflation will remain near the central bank’s target of 2% or a little less. The economy can support an […]