Federal Reserve

Archive for Federal Reserve

Comment of the Quarter: George Selgin

I was checking out my Mises email folder and came across this blog comment from George Selgin on a past article: Could everyone please, I mean PLEASE, stop writing FED? It isn’t an acronym, for goodness sake–it doesn’t stand for Fiat Emitting Disaster or something like that. It’s just an abbreviation of Federal. Got that? […]

Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell Get Pretty Radical on Fox!

It’s Judge Napolitano’s show, of course, but still: BTW, I was pleased to hear that Ron Paul also favors a transition period, rather than a one-shot “End the Fed on Tuesday.” This is the approach Carlos and I take in our new book. I think we accommodated the twin goals of ending injustice immediately, and […]

Konfident Krugman

Joseph Gagnon recommends a three-pronged attack by the Fed: First, the Fed should lower the interest rate it pays on bank reserves to zero….Three-month Treasury bills currently yield 0.15 percent, and that rate, too, should be brought down to zero. Second, the Fed should bring down the rates on longer-term Treasury securities by targeting the […]

Jim Grant Makes Bloomberg Interviewer Raise Her Eyebrows

The whole thing is great; HT2 the mysterious von Pepe. But at the end Grant really lets the Fed have it, and the interviewer is visibly taken aback.

DeLong on Deficits

By popular demand, today at Mises.org I critique a Brad DeLong blog post which had said, “We need bigger deficits now!” An excerpt: This is part of the problem with Keynesian economics. It’s true, in certain circumstances it can spit out an answer that is reasonable — such as this case, where DeLong agrees that […]

Inflationist, Heal Thyself

I was reading Scott Sumner and came across this: Benjamin Strong was President of the New York Fed during the 1920s, which effectively made him the Ben Bernanke of his time. According to Liaquat Ahamed (p. 293-94), Strong favored a policy that attempted to stabilize the economy by looking at “the trend in prices and […]

Betting on Deflation

Krugman has been on the warpath the last few days, confirming my suspicion that my email is tapped. I had just told Jeff Tucker that I was done writing Mises Daily submissions for a while (I still have a bunch in the queue), and then BAM Krugman starts writing about Hayek. Anyway in this post […]

A Fed Puzzle

If I were paid to blog, I would whip up a really fancy post for y’all, with purdy charts and commentary. But I’m not, so I won’t. The intriguing Von Pepe sends me this very important Zero Hedge article looking at the Fed’s activities from numerous angles. It is truly a “must read” for those […]