Posts Tagged ‘Federal Reserve’
By Simon Johnson The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to help limit the impact of financial panics. It took a while for the Fed to achieve that goal, but after World War II – with a great deal of help from other parts of the federal government – the Fed hit its stride. Today [...]
By James Kwak Bernie Sanders’s “audit the Fed” amendment, which expands the ability of the Government Accountability Office to review Federal Reserve operations, seems to be gaining some momentum. Opponents, including the Obama administration and Fed chair Ben Bernanke, are mounting a defensive effort. There are two main arguments that I have heard. The first [...]
By James Kwak Donald Kohn recently announced that he is resigning as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, after forty years in the Federal Reserve system, most of it in Washington. Articles about Kohn have generally been positive, like this one in The Wall Street Journal. The picture you get is of [...]
I’m not the one saying it–that would be Robert Samuelson, columnist for Newsweek and the Washington Post. The sole point of Samuelson’s recent opinion piece is that Ben Bernanke’s job is to increase confidence. Like much but not all error, there is a grain of truth to this point. Thanks to John Maynard Keynes (whom [...]
Paul Krugman says that Simon’s idea that he should be chair of the Fed is “crazy.” Krugman’s point is either that he wouldn’t be confirmed or that he wouldn’t be able to bring the Open Market Committee along. Maybe he’s right about the former; a Republican filibuster does seem reasonably likely. I don’t think he’s [...]
His confirmation, that is. I summarized most of my position in Foreign Policy, which asked me to lay out the anti-confirmation argument. My reasons overlap with Simon’s but are not identical–I think Simon worries about cheap money and asset bubbles more than I do. I was originally not particularly motivated by the anti-Bernanke campaign, because [...]
There’s a platitude repeated by most CEOs that their main job is not anything so mundane as making decisions, but “mentoring and supporting people” or something like that. Most of the CEOs who repeat this are mediocre at best at mentoring or supporting people, since the key people for any CEO are not the people [...]
The American Economics Association is meeting in Atlanta, where Simon says it is frigid. I went to an early-January conference in Atlanta once. There was a quarter-inch of snow, the roads turned to ice, and everything closed. All flights were canceled, so I and some friends ended up taking the train to Washington, DC, which [...]
I generally avoid writing about monetary policy, since every economics course I’ve taken since college has been a micro course, and besides Simon is a macroeconomist, among other things. But since just about everyone in my RSS feed has been linking to Tim Duy’s recent article on the Fed, I thought I would try to [...]
This post was written by StatsGuy, a regular commenter here and very occasional guest contributor. We asked him to expand on the ideas he put forward in this comment on the relationships between monetary policy, international capital flows, and bank capital requirements. Former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin is most famous for his notorious quip [...]
According to Reuters, the Federal Reserve recently got a stay of a federal district court’s order that the Fed must reveal details about which banks accessed its emergency loan programs during the financial crisis. The arguments on each side are pretty straightforward. Bloomberg, the plaintiff, is arguing that the public has a right to know [...]
With the anniversary of the Lehman-AIG-rest of the world debacle fast approaching, it seems fair to ask: Who accepts any blame for creating our excessively crisis-prone system? Friends and contacts who work in the financial sector freely discuss their participation in activities they now regret. But where is the mea culpa, of any kind, from a public figure – our [...]
Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, insists that the Fed can protect consumers effectively against defective or dangerous financial products. He and his allies are therefore signaling opposition to – and even defiance of – key parts of the Treasury’s plan for regulatory reform, which involve setting up a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. [...]
There has been a lot of talk recently about Ben Bernanke, he of the Wall Street Journal op-ed and the multiple Congressional appearances. (Hey, can anyone put me in touch with his agent?*) At the risk of seeming ignorant (or revealing myself to be ignorant), I must say I don’t really understand what the fuss [...]
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Ben Bernanke Doesn’t Get the Message
August 30, 2011 in Commentary
Tags: Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve, inflation, monetary policy
By James Kwak I was on vacation last week (far from Jackson Hole) when Ben Bernanke gave his widely anticipated speech. The media (see the Times, for example) seemed to focus mainly on his criticisms of the political branches and economic policymaking, which were accurate enough. But in my opinion, Bernanke drew the wrong lessons [...]