Back in the spring of 2018, yours truly responded at length to a speech then New York Fed President Bill Dudley gave, defending the Fed's "floor" system of monetary control. In that speech, Dudley claimed that "the case for retaining the current floor system is very compelling."…
In a post published here in mid-November, I traced the Fed's repo-market troubles to post-2008 changes in the importance and volatility of two of the Fed's non-reserve liabilities: TGA balances and the foreign repo pool. Then, in a companion piece, I made some suggestions for reining-in those…
From President Trump lobbing invectives against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Twitter to progressives clamoring for the Federal Reserve to use monetary policy to finance social projects, our central bank’s independence looks increasingly tenuous. Recently, Chairman Powell called for an internal "strategic review" of how…
Milton Friedman (1951, 1960) provided influential back-of-the-envelope estimates of the costs devoted to extracting gold under what he called a “strict” gold standard. I have criticized those estimates elsewhere (White 1999, pp. 42-48) for exaggerating the volume of gold reserves used by actual gold-standard economies, and thus…
Yesterday, Joe Nocera penned an extraordinary column expressing his bafflement at the Trump administration’s drive to release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two firms that purchase and guarantee around half of single-family mortgages in the United States, from government conservatorship. Nocera argues against such a move, writing…