By L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Research Director with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability and Senior Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, who writes for New Deal 2.0. There is a growing consensus that it is time for President Obama to fire Treasury Secretary […]
Read more...Although investors have been worried about the Fed’s exit strategy for some time, you wouldn’t see much evidence if you looked at the markets. While gold prices are an exception, the stock market appears to reflect optimism about recovery (although cynics would say it really is a function of liquidity, not fundamental views). Either premature […]
Read more...I saw this item on RGE Monitor (Nouriel Roubini’s blog/economic analysis website) and was gobsmacked: Greetings from RGE! A couple months ago, in a widely read FT op-ed, Nouriel Roubini warned that the “mother of all carry trades,” one funded in U.S. dollar denominated debt, could pump up asset bubbles around the world… When uncovered […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns As a writer, Matt Taibbi is a lot more vitriolic than I am. He curses, makes some pretty over-the-top personal attacks, and divines a policymaker’s intent where I don’t think he can. But, this goes mostly to style. Substantively speaking, he has a lot to say and we should […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. Monetary policy is center stage as the Fed pursues highly accommodative policies in order to generate a recovery and […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is nothing if not decisive in his views, and has a undisguised fondness for the bearish perspective. But he was correct on the 2008 inflation/commodities headfake, saying repeatedly that deflationary forces would prevail when that was decidedly a minority view. He is also a Euro-skeptic, and I’m less comfortable with that position. The […]
Read more...By John Bougearel, author of Riding the Storm Out and Director of Financial and Equity Research for Structural Logic Policymakers managed to extinguish a financial panic in 2008-09 by March 2009. This rescue operation allowed the broad U.S. stock market as measured by the SP500 to rally nearly 70%. Extinguishing the panic was to be […]
Read more...By Bruce Krasting, a former foreign exchange and derivatives trader and hedge fund manager. Mohammad said, “One cannot foretell the future”. I think he was on to something. What looks predictable rarely happens. There are always surprises. I have been tripped up so many times. The following are not predictions of things that will happen. […]
Read more...By Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC. Readers may have noticed Janet Tavakoli’s recent article at Huffington Post on Goldman Sachs and AIG. While much of it covers territory that Yves and I already wrote about previously, Ms. Tavakoli stops short of telling the […]
Read more...An intriguing piece is up at the Washington Post, “Fed’s approach to regulation left banks exposed to crisis,” not simply because it does a good job of finding and analyzing some case studies of the Federal Reserve’s failures at a bank regulator, but also because in the critical opening paragraphs, it launches a full bore […]
Read more...An op-ed in the Sunday New York Times by former investigators and prosecutors Eliot Spitzer, Frank Parnoy, and William Black calls for AIG to put non-privileged e-mails, accounting documents, and financial models on line to allow for an “open source” investigation. The questions they want to examine include: As fraud investigators, we would like to […]
Read more...The party line is that Ben Bernanke’s confirmation for a second term as Fed chief is a shoe-in, although he might face an unseemly amount of roughing up, like having to step down briefly if the senators who plan to put a hold on his vote succeed in delaying it beyond the end of January. […]
Read more...Edward Harrison here. Here is a video clip of mark Thoma talking about the Federal Reserve Chairman’s chances of re-appointment. He says time is not on Chairman Bernanke’s side. If you saw the Ron Paul video at Credit Writedowns yesterday, you could see what’s happening. I don’t have a strong view, although I believe most […]
Read more...This morning, Senator Jeff Merkley, a freshman Senator from Oregon, announced he would vote against Bernanke’s confirmation: Tomorrow, I will vote against confirming Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The reason, in short, is that as Chairman, Dr. Bernanke failed to recognize or remedy the factors that paved the road to this dark […]
Read more...Senator Jim Bunning gave a long, detailed, specific, and very good list of questions to Fed chair Ben Bernanke, and Bunning has posted the resulting Q&A on his website. I find this a pretty remarkable document. While a certain amount of bureaucratic jousting is to be expected (ie, there is a level of artful dodging […]
Read more...