"The FOMC should forget about r* for the moment and focus on … the supermassive black hole at the center of global dollar funding markets."—Zoltan Poszar, 21 August, 2019. A few weeks ago, as part of its effort to prevent overnight rates from rising above the Fed's…
The Fed’s persistent failure to reach its 2 percent inflation target ever since that target was first made explicit in 2012 has elicited a great deal of commentary in the last couple months, from economists, journalists, and some Fed officials themselves. And well it ought to, for…
Despite both the recent release of a set of “GSE reform principles” by the Mortgage Bankers Association and Treasury Secretary Designee Steven Mnuchin’s promise to prioritize reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as matters stand such reform seems likely to remain stalled for some time: while…
I chose my title carefully. I will focus on what is possible for the U.S. central bank to achieve rather than what they might want to accomplish or may attempt to effect. I examine three possible senses in which the Federal Reserve could not raise interest rates,…
In my last post in this series, I observed that an economy's "base" money serves as the "raw material" that commercial banks and other private-market financial intermediaries employ in "producing" deposits of various kinds that can themselves serve as means of exchange. If they could do so…