41–50 of 228 posts
Ok, say you believe this is going to happen. What the hell can you really do?
I have a question about the federal funds rate that I haven't ever had a good explanation for. It is: To what extent is the fed funds rate set to match market demand, and to what extent is it controlled completely independently of market demands? If anyone has a good answer, I would appreciate it a lot. To flesh out my question a little further, let's say that the fed decides one day to change the fed funds rate from…
Banks don't typically borrow from the Fed as it's viewed as a sign of being unable to borrow from another bank. It's part of the reason the Big Banks were forced by the Fed to ask for a loan during the 2008 crisis, so smaller banks could ask for loans without looking weak.
Ben Bernanke’s point in his recent memoir is that central banks can only do so much. At the end of the day, monetary policy is not social change, moral evolution, or political coalition building. These things happen outside the Central Banking system and are just as important for a functioning economy. I know this sounds controversial, but at this point quite frankly the deficit does not matter. There is so much debt…
we are likely heading towards a global debt write-off.
Household debt: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N
"Public" (Government) debt: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
This lag between economic policy and outcomes is a big reason the US has such a disingenuous public debate. Getting what you can in the short term, while being deceptive about long term effects, has become a good strategy. [1]
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/republicans-ta... “The essence of this strategy is to take tax policy out of the hands of experts and entrust it to activists. These campaigns do not usually have much credibility with card-carrying economists. ”
The combination of tax repatriation, tax cuts, and large-scale deficit spending (fiscal expansion) late in the economic cycle (recessions typically happen every 8 years or so, and the current expansion has been going on for ~10 yrs now) while the Federal reserve is raising interest rates (monetary 'contraction') is more or less unprecedented (we've never seen it happen in modern times in the US or any other large dev…
The so called business cycle is created by the FED itself. Left uncontrolled, the market will disconnect from reality and create bubbles that can destroy the economy, as it did in 1929. The unrecognized work of the FED is to increase the interest rates periodically to force these bubbles to pop and create a minor recession before they can collapse the economy. The real risk of this cycle is that the FED has already l…
The business cycle of boom and bust is characteristic of capitalism as a system, and if anything, the elastic monetary policy that the Federal Reserve allows has softened the blows.
The combination of tax repatriation, tax cuts, and large-scale deficit spending (fiscal expansion) late in the economic cycle (recessions typically happen every 8 years or so, and the current expansion has been going on for ~10 yrs now) while the Federal reserve is raising interest rates (monetary 'contraction') is more or less unprecedented (we've never seen it happen in modern times in the US or any other large dev…
The so called business cycle is created by the FED itself. Left uncontrolled, the market will disconnect from reality and create bubbles that can destroy the economy, as it did in 1929. The unrecognized work of the FED is to increase the interest rates periodically to force these bubbles to pop and create a minor recession before they can collapse the economy. The real risk of this cycle is that the FED has already l…
(What is hard to know is how much laundered money props up real estate in London, NYC, Miami, etc., and if we crack down on laundering, whether it will pop the bubble. Adam Davidson and Seth Hettena have written well on how we got here and why it will be difficult to unroll.)
I have a question about the federal funds rate that I haven't ever had a good explanation for. It is: To what extent is the fed funds rate set to match market demand, and to what extent is it controlled completely independently of market demands? If anyone has a good answer, I would appreciate it a lot. To flesh out my question a little further, let's say that the fed decides one day to change the fed funds rate from…
"[..] the central bank (that is, the government) can always set bond yields at whatever level it chooses including zero."
A different question is if institutional arrangements will allow it. But even when they not, if the crisis is big enough they will. See the example of the debt crisis in the Eurozone. It finished the day that governor of the European Central Bank decided to do "whatever it takes" (1), even if the operations that they are doing are technically illegal in the framework of the Eurozone.
(1). https://qz.com/1038954/whatever-it-takes-five-years-ago-toda...
I have a question about the federal funds rate that I haven't ever had a good explanation for. It is: To what extent is the fed funds rate set to match market demand, and to what extent is it controlled completely independently of market demands? If anyone has a good answer, I would appreciate it a lot. To flesh out my question a little further, let's say that the fed decides one day to change the fed funds rate from…
Changing that rate does cause impacts on the rest of interest rates (e.g. bonds), though.