[Author's note: as I composed this essay, unbeknownst to me, some clever devil in the Trump administration thought it wise to change the geographic designations of President Trump's current nominees to the Fed's Board of Governors. Thus Judy Shelton, who in the January 16th nomination announcement was…
The Community Reinvestment Act is supposed to ensure that banks lend to low- and moderate-income households wherever they operate. But there are reasons to doubt its effectiveness. In the Washington Post this summer, I reported findings (from a forthcoming paper with Andrew Forrester) that more than two-thirds…
In some previous posts, I've taken Federal Reserve officials, including former New York Fed President William Dudley, to task for continuing to insist that the Fed's post-2008 "floor" operating system is a "simple" means for keeping overnight interest rates on target. Whatever the floor system's merits may…
As we start off the New Year, we thought it might not be a bad idea to remind our readers of the need to resist status-quo bias in assessing both the Fed's performance and the merit of alternative institutional arrangements. -Ed. *** Although the movement to “End…
On November 12th I wrote a longish post explaining how growth fluctuations in two of the Federal Reserve's less-familiar liabilities—the foreign repo pool (FRP) and the Treasury General Account (TGA)—had contributed to a shortage of bank reserves that in turn caused repo rates to spike. I followed…