A few days ago, in response to the Fed's March 23rd announcement that it planned to help smaller businesses through a new Main Street Lending Program, I posted an essay here about the Fed's 13(b) business-lending program—a New Deal arrangement that had the same aims. Among other…
Money-market mutual funds (MMMFs) have had a turbulent couple of weeks. On March 18, the Federal Reserve System created a Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) to "assist money market funds in meeting demands for redemptions by households and other investors." What's the source of the…
Any day now, the Federal Reserve will start making loans to small and medium-sized businesses, breaking new ground with its Section 13(3) lending authority. Yet this won't be the first time the Fed set its sights on Main Street businesses. In this post, I'll first review the…
They say that a bad penny always turns up. But when it comes to crises these days, it seems that what keeps turning up is a bad idea—namely, the idea of having the U.S. Mint strike one or more trillion-dollar platinum coins. As I explained last March,…
Predictably, the depths of the present economic crisis, including the remarkable flattening of interest rates since it began, have led to several calls by economists, including Jordi Gali and the Mercatus Institute's David Beckworth, for the Fed and other central banks to ready their money choppers for…