When Alan Greenspan raised rates more than a decade ago, he just commanded that they be raised and the markets dutifully obeyed. The myth was unchallenged that the Fed could, if it wished, flood the market with bank reserves to reduce rates or contrarily starve it of reserves to raise them. The events of 2007-09 were essentially direct defiance to [...]
In December 2000, the Financial Post orchestrated what it billed as a great debate, a clash of titans pitting two giants of economics against each other in a series of eight questions. Dubbed the Nobel Money Duel, on the one side was Robert Mundell, a Nobel Laureate often credited as the “father of the euro.” On the other was Milton [...]
The personal savings rate rose slightly in August, though as I have shown before in truth we have no idea what the actual savings rate might be. The revisions to it over the years have made it one of the least reliable indications in the economics catalog. The reason is the suddenly frequent tendency of the BEA to seriously revise [...]
Last April, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote a series of blog posts for Brookings that was intended to explain one of the biggest contradictions of his legacy. If quantitative easing had actually worked as he to this day suggests that it did, why wasn’t the bond market in clear agreement? In order to try to reconcile the huge discrepancy, [...]
Though I highly doubt he will admit it, he’s just not the type, even Ben Bernanke knows on some level that bond market is decidedly against him, or at least his legacy. Economists have a funny way of looking at bonds, decomposing interest rates into Fisherian strata. To monetary policy, interest rates break down into three parts: expected inflation over [...]
As noted earlier today, the bond market is not truly a mystery or middle. In very simple terms that even Alan Greenspan might be able to understand, rising inflation and economic opportunity are reflected in higher interest rates and a steeper yield curve; full stop. The bond market, however, does not possess a crystal ball and thus must rely on [...]
Alan Greenspan is confused - again. The man who admitted to the world a decade ago he didn’t know much if anything about interest rates is now trying to change that reputation by suggesting yet again interest rates are set to rise. In testimony before Congress in February 2005, the then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve actually said: For the moment, [...]
There is absolutely no need whatsoever to pay any attention to what Janet Yellen says. There is even less call for parsing the increasingly ridiculous FOMC statement, particularly with regard to inflation where it will continue to suggest “professional forecasters” are the only way (left) to measure monetary policy effectiveness. Instead, four times a year the FOMC meeting coincides with [...]
Over the years, the “wealth effect” has been taken as a core component of monetary policy. Central bankers will not admit it, of course, but particularly stock prices are a central element of their strategy. It almost has to be that way given that the modern version of econometrics applies rational expectations theory as a literal condition. Since expectations form [...]
For some reason Alan Greenspan’s opinions are still taken seriously. No one single person has done more to damage the economic long run that his Keynesian training told him would never matter. We are living in that increasingly desolate long run, and yet somehow to the media to some nontrivial extent beyond it he has maintained credibility. What is most [...]
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