While still a professor of Economics at Princeton, future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also a Research Associate for the NBER. In 1999, in his capacities with the latter organization, Bernanke advocated for widespread adoption of inflation targeting. At that time, only a few central banks had experimented with it and there wasn’t much evidence for its effectiveness. Publishing [...]
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. Buddha Review It's that time of year again, time to cast the runes, consult the iChing, shake the Magic Eight Ball and read the tea leaves. What will [...]
In September 2009, leaders of the G20 nations got together in Pittsburgh. It was the third such summit in close succession following the devastating events of the monetary crisis, ostensibly so that each head of state could share strategies with the others as to how to avoid blame. Solutions weren’t in good supply, obviously. Populism was a bit different in [...]
The FOMC had voted to taper the final purchasing levels of its third and fourth QE programs at the end of October 2014. Just two days later, the Bank of Japan’s policy committee would vote to expand theirs (already with the extra “Q”). The diverging outlooks punctuated a period of high uncertainty. No more so than global asset markets. When [...]
If there is one thing Ben Bernanke got right, it was this. In 2009 during the worst of the worst monetary crisis in four generations, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman was asked in front of Congress if we all should be worried about zombies. Senator Bob Corker wasn’t talking about the literal undead, rather a scenario much like Japan where the [...]
We often forget, the middle 2000’s was not uniquely a housing bubble. It commanded our attention because that’s what ended up affecting so many Americans personally; whether foreclosures or just the negative “wealth effect” of declining real estate values. This was also pretty easy to understand, an asset bubble though complicated in its full manifestations intuitive as a result. There [...]
The effective federal funds (EFF) rate actually dipped 1 bp last Friday. Having spent the prior eight trading days equal to IOER at 2.20%, it might’ve been heartening for US central bankers under siege. After all, they adjusted that particular policy tool back in June and then in July said this whole EFF thing was due to “special factors” that [...]
On February 12, 1999, the Bank of Japan announced that it was going full zero. Japan’s central bank would from that day forward push the overnight uncollateralized lending (interbank) rate to the zero lower bound. Further, it pledged to keep it there until Japan’s economy recovered. The economic slump in the nineties had been by 1999 almost a decade in [...]
Paul Volcker caused a minor stir last week releasing a book he has been working on. The aging former Federal Reserve Chairman apparently has a lot to say about the current state of affairs. “We’re in a hell of a mess in every direction,” he told Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times. No kidding; that about sums it [...]
We will hear all day and for the next month (at least) about the two best quarters of GDP growth in four years. Somehow this will be used to justify calling this an economic boom, even though those two quarters in 2014 supposedly didn’t qualify. And they were better quarters, at least so far as real GDP goes. Knee-jerk reactions [...]
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