“Motionless Fed Likely to Provide No Cheer”
“No news isn’t always good news. When Federal Reserve officials meet this week, almost two months will have passed since their last policy-setting conclave, the longest such stretch of the year. And it has been a pretty woeful period for financial mark …
READ MORE“The Folly of Currency Pegs”
“The current flap over the sustainability of Greece’s membership in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is reminiscent, in many ways, of the events leading up to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system—another ultimately untenable currency …
READ MORE“Monetarism Defiant” – Anna Schwartz on the Fed
“Anna Schwartz must be the oldest active revolutionary on earth. Born in 1915 in New York, she can still be found nearly every day at her office in the National Bureau of Economic Research on Fifth Avenue, where she has been tirelessly gathering data s …
READ MORE“The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman”
“Few events in U.S. history can rival the Great Depression for its impact. The period from 1929 to 1941 saw fundamental changes in the landscape of American politics and economics, including such monumental events as America ’s going off the gold stand …
READ MORE“A Stable Price Level Standard for Federal Reserve Monetary Policy”
“In a recent article in the Cato Journal dealing with the transparency of Federal Reserve monetary policy, Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Chairman Ben Bernanke provided an authoritative account of current Federal Reserve strategy (Cato Journal, v …
READ MOREChile Starts Monetary Tightening
Chile has rebounded strongly from the global recession, in spite of the devastating earth quake that hit early in 2010. In response to the financial crisis, the monetary authorities cut its key lending rate from 8.25 per cent in September 2008 all the …
READ MORE“Politicizing the Fed”
“For 97 years the 12 regional banks of the Federal Reserve system have operated relatively free of political interference from Washington. The looming financial reform bill threatens that independence, not least through an effort to impose new presiden …
READ MORE“Congress Begins Conference on Financial Regulation”
“Today begins the televised political theatre that Barney Frank has been waiting months for: the first public meeting of the House and Senate conferees on the two financial regulation bills. While there are a handful of important differences between th …
READ MOREControlling the Fed
Blame goes to the Fed. They allowed a financial crisis due to lack of regulation and oversight of the banking/financial industry. At least that is the claim of today’s policy makers. While I may not disagree that the Fed holds much of the responsibilit …
READ MORE“A Monetary Policy Simulation Game”
The author presents a computer game that puts the player in the role of a central bank governor. The game is a stochastic simulation of a standard reduced form macro model, and the user interacts with this simulation by manipulating the interest rate.
READ MORE“Monetary Policy Rules and Business Cycles”
“Basic features of business cycle properties under both exogenous and endogenous monetary policy rules are examined in calibrated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal rigidities (the nominal wage contract model, the monopolistic c …
READ MORE“Federal Reserve chief says U.S. budget on road to peril”
“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Wednesday that “the federal budget appears to be on an unsustainable path,” but also recognized that an “exceptional increase” in the deficit had been necessary to ease the pain of recession. In nearly two …
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