In an article in the Telegraph, “How the Fed triggered the Arab Spring uprisings in two easy graphs,” Andrew Lilco argues that ” the Fed seems very clearly to have achieved more in the Arab world in six months than the Pentagon achieved in decades.” (hat tip Richard Smith):
Read more...The Roosevelt Institute hosted a conference yesterday on the future of the Federal Reserve, with the speakers including Joe Stiglitz, Jeff Madrick, Matt Yglesias, Joe Gagnon, Dennis Kelleher, Mike Konczal and Matt Stoller. Yours truly broke her Linda Evangelista rule to attend.
The discussion included the contradictions in the central bank’s various roles, its neglect of its duty to promote full employment, and its overly accommodative stance as a regulator, which has been enlarged thanks to Dodd Frank.
You can visit the Roosevelt site to view each of the three panels in full (they include the Q&A, which were very useful), the introductory remarks by Joe Stiglitz, or the presentations by each speaker separately. I encourage you to watch some of the panels, and to entice you, I’ve included videos from two talks I particularly liked below.
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager Cross posted from New Deal 2.0.
Bernanke’s QE2 program has hurt savers, done nothing for banks, and eviscerated middle class living standards.
The U.S. Federal Reserve signaled the end of its controversial $600 billion bond-buying program as planned. And not a moment too soon.
Read more...Readers may know that tomorrow at 2:30 PM, Ben Bernanke is hosting the first press conference ever held by a Federal Reserve chairman ever. It’s remarkable that an official widely described as “the second most powerful person in America” has managed to sidestep basic measures of accountability to the public and transparency like this for so long.
We are participating in an effort spearheaded by the Dylan Ratigan show to crowdsource questions for reporters tomorrow.
Read more...You heard it first in the blogopshere. From the New York Times:
Read more...The Federal Reserve’s experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt has pumped up the stock market, reduced the cost of American exports and allowed companies to borrow money at lower interest rates.
But most Americans are not feeling the difference, in part because those benefits have been surprisingly small….
Last week, we inveighed against an effort by Federal banking regulators to undermine the 50 state attorney general settlement negotiations on foreclosure and mortgage abuses. This affair is becoming a pathetic spectacle, in that the state initiative, which looks to be an exercise in form over substance, still might prove to be enough of a nuisance to the banks that the Powers that Be in Washington feel compelled to do what they can to hamstring it. The first effort was to have a joint settlement, which we dismissed as a barmy idea given the disparity in state and Federal issues. Not surprisingly, the Feds withdrew after the first negotiating session with the banks.
The current end run is apparently led by the Ministry of Bank Boosterism more generally known as the OCC and comes via consent decrees that were issued Wednesday.
Read more...By Satyajit Das, author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Forthcoming in Q3 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)
Quantitative easing (“QE”), the currently fashionable form of voodoo economics favoured by policymakers in the US, is primarily directed at boosting asset values and creating inflation. By essentially creating money artificially, central bankers are seeking to return the world to stability, growth and prosperity.
The underlying driver is to generate growth and inflation to enable the problems of excessive debt in the economy to be dealt with painlessly. It is far from clear whether it will work
Read more...By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Forthcoming in Q3 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)
Quantitative easing (“QE”) is the currently fashionable form of voodoo economics favoured by policymakers in the US.
QE, loosely “printing money”, entails central banks buying government bonds, which are held on the central bank’s balance sheet to inject money into the banking system thatcan be exchanged by banks for higher return assets, such as loans to clients. The purchases also increase the price of governments bonds, reducing interest rates.
Advocates of QE believe that it will lower interest rates promoting expenditure, growth, reduce unemployment and increase the supply of credit to underpin a strong economic recovery. In reality, QE is primarily directed at boosting asset values, subsidising banks, weakening the currency, helping the government finance its deficits and creating inflation.
Read more...n the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, launches into an improvised soliloquy: “… Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. “Voodoo” economics.”
In the late twentieth century, US President Ronald Reagan discovered voodoo economics. In framing policy responses to the global financial crisis, central bankers and governments have increasingly embraced more exotic forms of voodoo.
Read more...Some aggressive spinning on the Fed data releases about its lending during the financial crisis has surfaced at Bloomberg (admittedly with some less favorable facts also included). The Friends of the Fed and other Recipients of Largesse are defending the central banks’ panicked and indiscriminate responses to the crisis. These efforts to rationalize emergency responses fail to acknowledge underlying regulatory failings that remain unaddressed.
The PR push surrounds the foreign bank that got the most support during the post-Lehman phase, namely, Dexia.
Read more...hink I’ve ever seen anything so craven heretofore.
As readers may recall, we weren’t terribly impressed with the so-called mortgage settlement talks. It started out as a 50 state action in the wake of the robosigning scandal, and was problematic from the outset. Some state AGs who were philosophically opposed to the entire exercise joined at the last minute, presumably to undermine it. Not that they needed to expend much effort in that direction, since plenty of Quislings have signed up for the job.
Read more...I hope NC readers don’t mind my belaboring the issue of the TARP’s phony success, but every time I see the Administration’s propaganda parroted I feel compelled to weigh in.
The trigger was an effort at a balanced assessment by Annie Lowrey at Slate, to which I have some objections, followed by some shameless and misguided cheerleading by Andrew Sullivan:
Read more...But two years ago, I sure didn’t expect the government to make a profit from TARP. And I sure didn’t expect the auto bailouts to become such huge successes.
What’s surprising to me is how pallid is the Obama administration’s spin has been on this. I never hear them bragging about how they managed to pull us out of the economic nose-dive we were facing. I know why: the recession isn’t over, even if TARP was a success, no one wants to hear about it, etc. But it’s one of the strongest and least valued part of Obama’s record – along with the cost control innovations in health insurance reform.
At some point, you have to stand up and defend your record. No doubt Obama is biding his time on this. But count me as surprised as I am impressed.
The level of corruption in our society is so high that it is not only out in the open, but actively enabled by people in very high places. It shouldn’t be any surprise that the famed Turbo Timmie, a man who somehow was forgiven for having neglected to pay payroll taxes while a consultant to the IMF, would not be terribly sensitive as far as ethics rules are concerned. The latest fiascos involve the already-overly-bank-friendly New York Fed.
We’ve commented on some recent revolving door horrorshows.
Read more...We seem to be going back to the world before the crisis in number of respects. The first is that the Financial Times is again running rings around the Wall Street Journal on markets and financial services industry coverage. The crisis forced the Journal to throw a lot of resources on those beats, with the result that it became pretty competitive.
The second is that the authorities seem to be engaged in a weird form of cognitive dissonance. They clearly can’t pretend the crisis didn’t occur; if nothing else, all the extra new studies and rulemaking imposed by Dodd Frank make that impossible. Yet in every manner imaginable, they behave as if no financial markets near death event took place.
The object lesson of the evening is a story in the Financial Times on a battle between the FDIC, which is responsible for resolution of systemically important firms under Dodd Frank versus the Fed and Treasury. The struggle is over how many non-banks are to put on the systemically important watchlist as required by Dodd Frank. No one wants to be on that roster; it leads to the potential to be subject to all sorts of proctological examinations.
Read more...Former central banker Willem Buiter once remarked that the Federal Reserve’s “unusual and exigent circumstances” clause, which enables it to lend to “any individual, partnership or corporation” if it can’t get the dough from other banks, allows the Fed to lend against a dead dog if it so chooses.
It looks like the US central bank did precisely that.
Read more...