naked capitalism

Swedish Lex says:

Groupthink on an imperial scale at the FED as a contributing factor to the crisis? We are schocked, truly shocked.

Time to dust off Montesquieu again, perhaps.

DH says:

What? You got a problem with central planning in our command economy? Get out of here!

Richard Kline says:

Angering anybody _at all_ is career threatening for a young academic. Which is one reason why young academics have so few really good ideas reach the surface, and pick most of their fights with folks who are safely dead.

The real sad fact is that in the US we have no independent intellectual community which could take a critical role. Once, there were non-profit or minimally for profit research institutes which generated some genuinely good work, and into which academics could rotate for some of their more pungent years. Find them on the map now, I can’t. Everyone wants tenure, so they check their brain at the door.

Gentlemutt says:

This is exactly why all those economists signed their self-serving petition a few months ago to protect the Fed from prying eyes in Congress. Their careers depend on conformity.

aaron says:

This seems a little too much like a conspiracy theory. Of course young economists don’t want to criticize the Fed, express a traditional Keynesian position, etc. Swimming against the current of economic theory is rarely a good career move, although there have been plenty of young economists in recent years that have made slight deviations from mainstream theory in there articles. In addition, most of the major articles in journals don’t deal with the present situation–at best, they go back 5 years or so. So no conspiracy theories are required. Actually, given that the Fed is generally considered a haven for Keynesians in this monetarist world, one might think that including more Fed reviewers and fewer pure academics might have encouraged better and more practical articles.

Charles says:

For those who forgot it, I remind that the Nobel Prize for Economics is sponsored by … a Central Bank !

For students that are brilliant and patient enough, revenge can ultimately be sweet. Check how Pigou has been humiliated by Keynes after being his mentor.

Hugh says:

What this is about is the maintenance of orthodoxies. The financial meltdown caught both academic and professional economists in a Larry Craig moment tapping their feet in the restroom stall. Their institutional reaction has been, as with Craig, to deny the obvious. Of course there have been exceptions and we all have our favorite list of them, but I can not remember an occasion in my lifetime when a discipline has been so deeply discredited across the board and remained in such denial about it. It is a good argument though why most economists can not be trusted to be part of the solution to our economic and financial problems and why too they should have no future role in systemic risk regulation.

ahab says:

“There is no cospiracy: it is just everybody thinking the same way, it is very normal herd behaviour.”

much truth to that- however- it would seem to me- with all the economic schools of thought- that better analysis would have been brought to light concerning he economic reality that was and is before us-

the Fed can’t control individual thought- and i think much of the dissenting opinion out there never sees the light of day because it does not get reported on by the MSM

mansoor h khan says:

Here is a radical alternative to the FED:

A Radical Solution for America’s Insolvent Financial System

The core problem of the United States banking system (and maybe the world’s banking system) is not liquidity but insolvency. The liabilities of the United States’ banking system exceed the value of its assets. The issue is not only the toxic assets (toxic mortgage backed securities, toxic commercial real estate loans, sub-prime mortgages, alt-A loans, adjustable loans likely to go bust, increase in prime mortgage default rates, etc) but also off-balance sheet liabilities (such as expected huge unaccounted for future derivatives losses).
This means that bailouts are just beginning and will require bigger and bigger sums of taxpayer money as time goes on. The government will resort to borrowing more and more and eventually to printing money when treasury debt auctions start failing. The end result of this path is a currency collapse and probably total chaos as expected by gold bugs.
One other way to deal with this issue is to stop the bailouts and let the dominoes fall. Defaults and cross-defaults will cause many, many depository institutions (even very large ones) to collapse leading to extreme decrease in money supply as bank deposits are destroyed. Deposits of failed banks cannot be used to pay bills, make purchases and/or service debts.
Which will probably lead to even more defaults as unemployment increases and debtor’s are unable to service their debts. This process will probably cause extreme deflation as businesses lower prices in a bid to survive. This will also lead to wage cuts, increased unemployment and a deflation spiral and much chaos. But probably less chaos than a currency collapse.
Is there a better way?
Here is my idea:
1) We essentially need an orderly bankruptcy and liquidation of the United States’ financial system.
2) I suggest we create a government owned bank and transfer all deposits of the private commercial banking system to the new government owned bank. This “transfer” is really just new money creation. This new money will be digital cash (electronic version of physical paper cash). Very much like reserves at the FED.
3) Note that the plan will not create net new money since we will be destroying all deposits of the commercial banking system in the process.
4) All assets of the commercial banking system will be transferred to the government and auctioned off in an orderly manner over the next 10 years. The proceeds from the sale would go the United States treasury and not the commercial banks. The assumption here is that commercial banks deserve nothing since the entire industry would have been most likely destroyed any way. Even good banks would have been destroyed due to bank runs and defaults if the government had allowed the dominoes to fall. Of course bank shareholders, bank bond holders and counter parties of bank derivatives would not receive anything.
5) After the transfer FDIC protection will be removed for any private bank which wishes to remain in business or any new private depository institution or bank. From that point on the government should make it absolutely clear that there will be no more bailouts and no more conversions. This will discourage (but not completely eliminate) fractional reserve deposit banking and private money creation that results from pyramiding of government created money. This will also limit debasement of the currency that results from fractional reserve deposit banking. In fact, we can have “free banking” from that point on and not even have reserve requirements or capital requirements. All depositors who use private banks will be fully at-risk. The industry will have to set the interest rate high enough to attract depositors.
6) The new government bank will act as an electronic “piggy bank” only. All deposits will be 100% reserve and it will not make any loans. Loan making will be left to the private banking system (with no deposit insurance or a possibility of a future bailout). The new government owned bank exists only as a “safe” money storage and a payment clearing system so the public does not have to carry around physical paper cash to make purchases and pay bills.
7) Of course this plan is not without pain or cost. Cost of funds for banks and borrowers will probably rise as bank deposits are a source of very low cost money for the banks. Nothing is free. We are just exchanging higher cost of funds for removal of systemic failure risk. Economically we are recognizing that when money is loaned there is always credit risk.
We are just separating the payment and clearing transaction system which is absolutely necessary for day-to-day commerce (no credit risk) from the loan banking and investment system (has credit risk).

Mansoor H. Khan
http://aquinums-razor.blogspot.com/