As I so often write, we still talk about 2008 because we aren’t yet done with 2008. It doesn’t seem possible to be stuck in a time warp of such immense proportions, but such are the mistakes of the last decade carrying with them just these kinds of enormous costs. It has been this way from the beginning, even before [...]
Kevin Warsh was named to Fortune Magazine’s 2009 list of 40 Under 40. He had been the youngest ever appointed to the Federal Reserve Board when President Bush put forward his name in 2006. Having been a banker in the M&A area of Morgan Stanley, Warsh was reported to have been instrumental in acting the liaison between Wall Street CEO’s [...]
The Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke committed several unforgivable mistakes during his tumultuous tenure, but cumulatively they could be easily summarized as “they really don’t know what they are doing.” Time and again whoever followed monetary policy and the conventions built upon it were led either off a cliff or somewhere just less dramatic. Federal Reserve actions are at best [...]
As I wondered yesterday, what good would opening up the Federal Reserve do for us? What you would find is already out on the table. We would be treated to hidden insight that already exists in public, such as that delivered by FRBSF President (and CEO) John Williams just today (thanks to T. Tateo for pointing it out). He pronounced [...]
What good would opening monetary policy do? The “audit the Fed” bill has been passed again, this time out of committee and possibly set for a floor vote in the House. Though questions remain about the Senate, with at least President Trump its prospects are better than at any time it passed before. Proponents of the idea want to make [...]
According to Alan Greenspan in a speech delivered at Stanford University in September 1997, monetary policy in the United States had been shed of M1 by late 1982. The Fed has never been explicit about exactly when, or even why, monetary policy changed dramatically in the 1980’s to a regime of pure interest rate targeting of the federal funds rate. [...]
There is gold in Asia, at least gold of the intellectual variety for anyone who wishes to see it. The Chinese offer us perhaps the purest view of monetary conditions globally, where RMB money markets are by design tied directly to “dollar” behavior. It is, in my view, enormously helpful to obsess over China’s monetary system so as to be [...]
The greatest mistake any statistician can make is to confuse correlation for causation. It is quite natural to do so, of course, a limitation not limited to modern society where information can at times seem limitless. There are also cases where you are left with little other alternative. But within them requires even more robust evidence and more thorough examinations, [...]
There was an extremely odd dynamic for monetary policy during the 1990’s and especially in the United States. The less Alan Greenspan said, the more markets were convinced he knew what he was doing. He purposefully said nothing, being attributed years later with developing this “fedspeak.” So long as he continued to say nothing, the more he would have to [...]
The cruelest part, perhaps, of this economic condition globally is how it plays against type. In all prior cycles, economies of all kinds and orientations all over the globe would go into recession and then bounce right of it once at the bottom. It was often difficult to see the bottom, of course, but once recovery happened there was no [...]
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