All Posts Tagged With: "Federal Reserve"
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Reading The Return of Depression Economics, I have to admit I was surprised. Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and New York Times columnist, isn’t as feisty and partisan in the book as he is in his column. Moreover, he presents some useful information about the many economic collapses that have occurred in [...]
18Nov2009 | William L. Anderson | 0 comments | ContinuedFinancial Crises and the Federal Reserve’s Punch Bowl
Why did the U.S. financial system nearly collapse last year? People blame Wall Street’s excessive greed and risk-taking. But without easy money, the massive risk-taking could not have happened.
To be sure, financial firms leveraged up—that is, they did a lot of business with borrowed money. That juiced up revenues and bonuses in the boom—and exacerbated [...]
Ben Bernanke Saved the Day?
Instead of being “brave,” Bernanke has been reckless, just like a young driver playing “chicken.” There is a huge difference between bravery and bravado, and Bernanke’s actions reflect the latter not the former.
28Oct2009 | William L. Anderson | 3 comments | ContinuedGetting in Deeper
In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a watershed moment for government intervention in the private sector," the Federal Reserve announced yesterday it will regulate executive compensation at all banks so that they will not have incentives to take on too much risk. The term "pretence of knowledge" comes to mind.
23Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 19 comments | ContinuedHow Much Money Does an Economy Need?
In How Much Money Does an Economy Need? Hunter Lewis addresses some of the most fundamental questions of monetary policy in a question-and-answer format. For a subject often clouded by technicalities, the language is refreshingly plain. Sometimes too plain, perhaps, to satisfy an academic economist. But academic economists aren’t the intended audience. The book can [...]
15Oct2009 | Lawrence H. White | 1 comment | ContinuedMeltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
Thomas Woods’s Meltdown is a marvel of writing and publishing. Having arrived on shelves in February, it offers a complete analysis of the causes of the current recession as well as a critical assessment of the mistakes policymakers have already made, and will likely continue to make, in response to the economic decline.
The marvel is [...]
Keynes’s Ghost
The multiplier argument is founded on two key assumptions that turn out to be false. First is the notion that savings are not spent but rather are withdrawn from the expenditure stream. The multiplier’s second incorrect premise is that government expenditures are “autonomous”; that is, government spending does not depend on current income.
9Jun2009 | James C. W. Ahiakpor | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Dynamics of Disintervention
1) government interventions into the market process tend systematically to generate unintended consequences; 2) many of these unintended consequences frustrate the announced goals of those who support the interventions; 3) the response to these frustrated intentions tends strongly in the direction of further intervention; 4) the economic system performs less effectively in coordinating the plans of buyers and sellers as it becomes burdened with the cumulative effects of an increasingly chaotic mix of interventions; and 5) the process comes to an end when these cumulative effects result in a major system-wide crisis and public choosers decide to reject interventionism in favor either of comprehensive planning or radically freer markets.
21May2009 | Sanford Ikeda | 0 comments | ContinuedA Crisis of Political Economy
The current state and the current banking sector require each other. They are so reciprocally intertwined that each is an extension of the other.
Remember this the next time somebody tells you, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert did, that “free market madmen” caused the current financial crisis that is threatening to undermine the global economy. There is no free market. There is no “laissez-faire capitalism.” The government has been deeply involved in setting the parameters for market relations for eons; in fact, genuine “laissez-faire capitalism” has never existed. Yes, trade may have been less regulated in the nineteenth century, but not even the so-called Gilded Age featured “unfettered” markets.
24Apr2009 | Chris Matthew Sciabarra | 5 comments | ContinuedRecycling Discredited Ideas
The current financial crisis has fueled a frenzied recycling of discredited Keynesian ideas. We are hearing again of the need for “public works,” of the need to “stimulate” the economy. The Federal Reserve is frantically inflating the supply of money. We are laying the groundwork for a disaster reminiscent of the 1970s—if not worse.
1Apr2009 | Peter Lewin | 5 comments | ContinuedA Microeconomist’s Protest
The conventional macroeconomic diagnosis and proposed cures ignore many important structural or microeconomic factors.
1Apr2009 | Mario Rizzo | 8 comments | ContinuedToo Big to Succeed
One widely cited culprit for the 2008 financial crisis was a supposed decision by the U.S. government not to regulate a relatively new type of financial instrument known as a credit default swap (CDS). In fact, this so-called “failure to regulate” refers to regulations that prohibited public trading of these instruments, concentrated risk in a small number of large firms, and massively increased the probability of a financial disaster. To add to the irony, one of the government officials most responsible for these interventions, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, recently apologized for having had too much faith in the free market when he should have apologized for not having had enough.
1Apr2009 | Less Antman | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Financial Bailouts: “See the Needle and the Damage Done”
On Wednesday, September 17, 2008, according to the New York Times, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke used “a speaker phone from his ornate office” to tell Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson “that it was time to adopt a comprehensive strategy that Congress would have to approve” for dealing with the financial-market troubles. After a second call on [...]
27Feb2009 | Lawrence H. White | 8 comments | ContinuedMonetary-Policy Disasters of the Twentieth Century
Kirby R. Cundiff is an associate professor of finance at Northeastern State University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an adjunct associate professor of finance at the University of Maryland University College.
The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 and soon did what central banks almost always do: it started printing lots of money. During World War [...]
The Greenspan Fed in Perspective
Some readers of the Wall Street Journal might have been led to believe that Alan Greenspan had somehow followed Milton Friedman’s monetary rule. We now see, though, that there was no well-grounded rule; there was no standard.
1Jun2006 | Roger Garrison | 0 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Who Controls the Money?
To the Editor:
“It Just Ain’t So!” by Richard Timberlake (December 1999) contains material errors that mislead readers. The Federal Reserve does not, as Professor Timberlake writes, have “monopoly power to increase or decrease the economy’s stock of money.” It is the banking system (of which the Fed is a component) that has [...]
Letters
Unquestionably, one of the most effective forms of communication is a thoughtful letter written to a person in answer to his own question.
The staff members of the Foundation for Economic Education write thousands of such letters each year. Some of these are, in effect, short articles on “general interest” subjects not fully covered in previous [...]
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Book Reviews
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
