29 November 2009
Mr. Ben Bernanke, Chairman
Federal Reserve Board
Washington, DC
Dear Mr Bernanke:
I had to down an extra mug of coffee this morning to be certain that I read your op-ed in today’s Washington Post correctly. Sure enough, you claim to be worried about a recent House-committee vote to, [...]
First of all, three points to serve as background:
From the day after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the policies followed by the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. administrations have been very helpful. They have been good ones. The alternative--standing back and watching the markets deal [...]
Those of us who liked Allan Meltzer's history of the Federal Reserve were shocked when he showed up this summer as a Republican hack, writing:
[gopleader.gov]: There is no greater recognition of the failure of the stimulus program to create jobs than the efforts to mislead the public into [...]
It was one year ago today that the Federal Reserve announced their plan to “reduce the cost and increase the availability of credit for the purchase of houses” On November 25, 2008 the Fed decided to support Main Street and the mortgage market by committing their first round of purchases [...]
THE minutes from the Federal Reserve's last meeting are now available to the public. Here's part of their discussion on [...]
Today’s rally in MBS has taken the 30 yr FNMA coupon to below 4% at 3.98%, for the first time since May 20th. Combining the treasury rally with continued purchases by the Federal Reserve (where Bullard wants to extend past the expected expiration in March) and likely end of yr [...]
I recommend a recent speech by my old classmate Bill Dudley, now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: More Lessons from the Crisis.
The reading is a little ... assumptive of some familiarity with financial markets. (Some casual readers might call the prose dense, but it's not [...]
Tim Duy thinks that the Federal Reserve has backed itself into a corner. He is right that the Fed because it was independent was in a "better position to raise regulatory and supervisory roadblocks during the debt build-up compared to other, more politically susceptible agencies." But at the time the [...]
Free Exchange muses on central bank independence.
I haven't done a nose count on the FOMC. But it is pretty clear that right now it has too many inflation hawks on it and not enough unemployment hawks. The only saving grace is that other central banks are worse--some much worse.
In the' [...]
Three points to serve as background:
First of all, from the day after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the policies followed by the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. administrations have been very helpful. They have been good ones. The alternative--standing back and watching the markets deal [...]
ALAN BLINDER opens a new Washington Post column with what I believe is the conventional wisdom:
The Federal Reserve's performance in this long-running financial and economic crisis deserves separate grades. For the early crisis [...]
Please stop patting Ben Bernanke on the back
ALAN BLINDER opens a new Washington Post column with what I believe is the conventional wisdom:The Federal Reserve's performance in this long-running financial and economic crisis deserves separate grades. For the early crisis period, from the summer of 2007 until a [...]
Why aren’t we listening more to this font of common sense and logic?
“A proposal to give banking regulators authority to block accounting standards is “a terrible idea,” Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said Monday.
Mr. Volcker has been an outspoken critic of “mark to market” [...]
At the Kellogg Distinguished Lecture Series, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
November 16, 2009
I titled my talk “Policy Challenges for the Federal Reserve.” I did that before I knew what I was going to discuss, because just [...]
Fed Pres Fisher is also speaking on the economy today and the Federal Reserve and one comment specifically stands out. He said that a goal of the Fed is to maintain the purchasing power of the US dollar. To quantify the success of this or lack thereof, one should look [...]
U.S. Week Ahead: Retail Results, Economy In Focus 11/13/2009
Retailers including Home Depot and Target will report results and key economic data will include retail sales and industrial output. Meanwhile, nine speakers from the Federal Reserve will offer their views on the economy. Stacey Delo reports.
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Asia’s Week Ahead: Obama [...]
Terrific Article in the FT on Fed Hawks & Doves:
STRONG DOVES
Janet Yellen, president, San Francisco Federal Reserve
Leading dove on the committee. A heavyweight former senior economic adviser in the Clinton White House who recently joined the Group of 30 leading global policymakers. Expects the recovery will [...]
The financial elites of this country were responsible for putting through the Federal Reserve System as a governmentally created and sanctioned cartel device to enable the nation's banks to inflate the money supply in a coordinated fashion. FULL ARTICLE by Murray Rothbard.
In a speech on Tuesday, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart drew some connections between the current commercial real estate (CRE) problems and the prospects for a small business-led recovery.
The starting point was an observation made in an earlier macroblog post that identified the important role [...]
Henrey Kaufman presents a lot of questions that the Fed is dealing with right now:
Today, with interest rates near zero and the stock market booming, increased political pressure will be put on the Fed when it begins to shift away from its current posture of quantitative easing. What will [...]
Release Date: November 10, 2009
For immediate releaseThe Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced the availability of a collection of brief articles that examine ways to improve the availability of housing options for low-income renters.
The publication, commissioned in conjunction with the Community Affairs staff at [...]
Frederick Sheehan is the co-author of Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve.
His next book, Panderer for Power: The True Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession, will be published by McGraw-Hill in [...]
An irrationally exuberant pathology
ONE of the reasons St. Louis Fed president Jim Bullard is more anxious than others to rein in Federal Reserve activity is a concern that leaving policy too loose for very long will lead to inflation of new asset bubbles. Should we be worried about [...]
Banks have pretty much stopped tightening credit standards, but that doesn't mean they are easing--maybe not, at least. The chart below is based on the Federal Reserve's Survey of Senior Loan Officers. The question asked is whether they tightened or eased credit standards. The chart shows "net percent," which [...]
