In our recent American Banker opinion piece, Heritage's Norbert Michel and I argue that, if the Fed is really serious about shrinking its balance sheet, it had better quit paying interest on banks' excess reserves (IOER) as well. How come? Because the current, relatively high IOER rate …
I have chosen a provocative title, but it is fully justified. Fed officials are flying on autopilot, but the controls don’t work anymore, or at least not reliably. Fed watchers are largely clueless. The investment community and the economy may be collateral damage. Let me begin by…
So says I, in commenting on Amar Bhidé's ill-informed opinion piece in yesterday's FT. Here, with some minor edits (which I failed to fix on time in the original), is what I wrote: Were Mr. Bhidé's own suggestions for monetary policy reforms sound, his swipe at fundamental criticisms…
On Tuesday, John Allison, chair of CMFA’s executive advisory board, former president of Cato, and 20-year CEO of BB&T, testified before the House Financial Services Committee. The hearing was on the recently proposed Financial CHOICE Act, which aims to reform Dodd-Frank. Beyond discussing the potential efficacy of that bill, Allison’s testimony…
Michael Bordo, John Duca, and Christoffer Koch recently produced a Cato Institute Research Brief on how policy uncertainty affects bank lending. The Cato Research Briefs in Economic Policy series allows economic researchers to write an accessible 2,000 word summary of an academic article that cuts through the…