Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy

“Latest Obama Economic Plan : Long on PR, Short on Economic Reality”

I participated in the White House Blogger conference call today, as a stand-in for the traveling Yves. The call was run by Jason Furman, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, who provided a brief recap of President Obama’s speech earlier in the day. The stated purpose of the call was to emphasize the […]

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Guest Post: Modern Monetary Theory — A Primer on the Operational Realities of the Monetary System

By Scott Fullwiler, Associate Professor of Economics at Wartburg College At its core, there are two parts to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The first is a description of how the monetary system actually works, mostly focusing upon interactions between the central bank, the treasury, and the financial system, though this part also requires a very […]

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Why Germany’s Rebound Is Not Such Good News

Wolfgang Munchau has an intriguing piece at the Financial Times debunking the idea the Germany’s recent peppy growth numbers are as salutary as Mr. Market seems to believe. Part of his message isn’t necessarily all that surprising, and comes towards the end of the article: ….it is important to keep some perspective and not draw […]

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Fears of Regime Change in New York

Normally, I don’t report on anecdotes from my immediate circle, but a set of conversations in less than a 24 hour period suggests that even those comparatively unaffected by the crisis are bracing themselves for the possibility of sudden, large-scale, adverse changes. And that sort of gnawing worry seems to be growing in New York […]

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Why Treasury Bonds Do Not Fund Our Federal Deficit

This is a particularly clear and succinct explanation of the role of Treasury auctions in monetary operations at Pragmatic Capitalism (hat tip BondSquawk), in a post I urge you to read in its entirety, “The Myth of the Great Bond “Bubble.” The government bond market is merely a monetary tool that the central bank utilizes […]

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Auerback: Which Party Poses the Real Risk to Social Security’s Future?

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0 Hint: it’s not Republicans. Social Security remains one of the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party since its creation 75 years ago. Although Republicans have historically fulminated against the program (Ronald Reagan once likened it as something akin to “socialism”), […]

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Alford: What Kind of Science Should Economics Be When It Grows Up?

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. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they […]

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The Fed’s Fallacious “QE Lite” Logic

The Fed seems to be exhibiting a pretty bad case of “if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” syndrome, particularly when it has (or perhaps more accurately, had) other tools at its disposal. In case you somehow missed it, global markets got a bad case of deflation heebie jeebies […]

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Steve Keen: Bank Profits a sign of economic sickness, not health

By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book Debunking Economics, cross posted from Steve Keen’s Debt Deflation. The record $6 billion profit that the Commonwealth Bank is expected to announce today is a sign of an economy that has been taken over by […]

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Summer Rerun: Has the Credit Contraction Finally Begun?

This post first appeared on July 11, 2007 Readers of this blog know that I have been concerned about the state of the credit markets for some time. We’ve had (until the last month or so), rampant liquidity feeding asset bubbles in virtually every asset class except the dollar and the yen, tight risk spreads […]

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Something has to give

Cross-posted from The price of everything By Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management, a London-based fund manager “More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six […]

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