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Established 1999

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    “Politics and the Fed”

    “The threat of politicization hangs over the Federal Reserve Board like the Sword of Damocles. It’s Capitol Hill’s response to the Fed’s proliferation of new programs to unglue credit markets. The Fed’s innovations threaten to create enough acronyms to tax the limits of the alphabet.” Read more.  “Politics and the Fed”  Alfred Tella  The Washington…

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    “The Fed and Politics”

    “Politically oriented monetary policies and business cycles are the inevitable by-products of a central bank, the ultimate favored banking institution which is viewed as a savior by some politicians facing elections. After the elections comes the bill: Inflation runs amuck. The nation goes into a painful recession, or the stock market crashes. Whatever the extent…

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    “How the Fed Is Holding Back Recovery” – David Malpass

    “Whether in Republican or Democratic administrations, the Washington policy consensus for a decade has been “print and spend.” When that doesn’t work, the Washington prescription is to double the dose—more monetary easing and dollar devaluation, and always more government spending. The Fed in particular has become accustomed to subsidizing federal borrowing by holding interest rates…

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    Messynomics and the Troubles with Money – Peter Boettke

    “Money is non-neutral, and the capital structure in an economy consists of combination of heterogeneous capital goods that multiple-specific uses. Once these propositions are included in the analysis, along with other messy aspects of the real world, our understanding of market theory and the price system shifts drastically. Nothing can be treated as given. Everything…

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    “Money and Finance in the Confederate States of America”

    “The Confederacy then turned to debt issue as a means of war finance. The South successfully sold some long-term government securities during the early stages of the war. Bond issues proved a limited source of war financing as Southern prospects diminished, however. Investors increasingly shied away from purchasing securities offered by a government with little…

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    Currency Chaos: Where Do We Go From Here? – Judy Shelton

    ‘The most important initiative you could take to improve the world economy would be to stabilize the dollar-euro rate.’Global monetary relations are in disarray. Exchange rates fluctuate wildly among the world’s major trade partners, spawning talk of protectionism and a currency war. Gold is soaring as the dollar slides, and economists debate whether the biggest…

  • Limited Purpose Banking?

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    Limited Purpose Banking?

    by Jerry O’Driscoll The following is a book review from the Cato Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Fall 2010). Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World’s Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking Laurence J. Kotlikoff (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, 241 pp.) Chapter 1 of the book is titled “It’s a Horrible…

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    “Bernanke says Federal Reserve ready to further stimulate the economy”

    “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke on Friday laid out a case for the central bank to take further action to bolster growth, citing the risks of prolonged high unemployment and a U.S. economy slipping into a deflationary spiral. In a much-anticipated speech in Boston, Bernanke did not spell out details of how and when…

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    Land of Confusion

    I thought that I would offer a run-through of what the government and the Fed have done to help us out during our troubled economic times. It is, of course, not a complete list, but it may be interesting to think about when you ask yourself why the latest recession went so badly.  1) Both…

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    Robust Political Economy and the Fed – Peter Boettke

    “But I wonder if in these discussions of monetary policy in response to the financial crisis the political economy of public policy is not seriously being overlooked. I have in fact raised these concerns before, and while the political economy costs are often acknowledged I don’t think they are fully absorbed into the analysis of…