Relax: the Fed isn't about to catch fire or melt. This isn't about that sort of warming. It's about a different, more benign sort of Fed warming that my pals at the Mercatus Center claim to have discerned. Still, I don't believe them. Call me a Fed…
Although dedicated Fed watchers long saw it coming, the big news from Jackson Hole is that the Fed now has a new monetary policy strategy—the crowning achievement of the much-ballyhooed review of its "Strategy, Tools, and Communications" it launched in early 2019. It's called "average inflation targeting,"…
"It is difficult to think of an important aspect of the New Deal to which Roosevelt had not plainly pledged himself before taking office. …Roosevelt had campaigned on a clear and specific New Deal Program." (Eric Rauchway, Winter War, pp. 15-17.) To understand the New Deal's shortcomings…
Cato's Annual Monetary Conference last November hosted a "shadow review" of the Federal Reserve's own self-review, dedicated to examining "whether the U.S. monetary policy framework can be improved to meet future challenges." The articles in the spring/summer 2020 issue of the Cato Journal, drawn from that conference,…
It's been 11 weeks since Congress passed the CARES Act, which, among its many other provisions, established the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Nearly three-quarters of U.S. small businesses have so far availed themselves of this program. But it turns out that fewer small businesses got a PPP…