Federal Reserve

Archive for Federal Reserve

David Stockman on Debt-Fueled Growth

From a recent post at David Stockman’s blog: “Monetary central planning is failing to achieve Keynesian “escape velocity” because it has deeply impaired the engines of capitalist enterprise. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the grotesque financialization of American business that has occurred since the 1980s. As usual, this deformation is rooted in the […]

Fed Announces (Tentative) End to Bond Purchases in October

The recently released Fed minutes contain the following information on their plans to fully complete the so-called taper: [P]articipants generally agreed that if incoming information continued to support its expectation of improvement in labor market conditions and a return of inflation toward its longer-run objective, it would be appropriate to complete asset purchases with a […]

The Fed Flirted With Insolvency in December

For a while now I have been warning people that even a slight rise in interest rates could render the Fed technically insolvent, because the market value of its assets would be lower than its outstanding liabilities. In terms of accounting, therefore, it would have negative shareholder equity. Now in early 2011, there was a […]

Tom Woods Interviews David Stockman

A great interview last week. In particular, Tom asks Stockman about Ronald Reagan’s governing style; really interesting stuff. If you like what you hear, remember that both Stockman and Tom will be speaking at the Night of Clarity in Nashville August 15! Full details here.

Is There a Reason For Stock Market to Be So High?

ZeroHedge has an interesting post relaying an FT report that central banks and other government institutions around the world have invested $29.1 trillion in market investments such as equities and gold. The ZeroHedge article then gives this interesting chart: Analysts who reject “conspiracy theories” might tell a plausible story about the above chart along the […]

Using More Government Intervention to Undo Effects of Previous Round

In their conversation regarding income inequality, investing, Austrian economics, and other sundry topics, former business partners Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel had this good exchange: Nassim Taleb: Mark, your book [The Dao of Capital–RPM] is the only place that understands crashes as natural equalizers. In the context of today’s raging debates on inequality, do you […]

In Defense of Permabears

In his never-ending campaign to discredit those who warned of financial bubbles before the 2008 crash, Scott Sumner recently quoted with approval the following from Alan Reynolds’ 2010 analysis of Shiller’s thoughts on investing: On the March 9 anniversary of the stock market implosion a year ago, a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal […]

Every Breath Bernanke Took

I dug this up for somebody on Facebook, and I was pleasantly surprised at how (unwittingly) prescient it was (particularly if we define inflation as an increase in the quantity of money). (The backstory is that the dean of Columbia Business School [CBS], Glenn Hubbard, had been in the running to replace Greenspan, but obviously […]