If the recent yield curve panic proves anything, it proves that, in financial markets, what may start out as a mere statistical correlation, and possibly a spurious one, can become a genuine causal relationship. In particular, if enough people subscribe to a post-hoc fallacy, it may not…
As regular Alt-M readers know, I've been saying for over a year now that, despite their promise to "normalize" monetary policy, Fed officials have been determined to maintain the Fed's post-crisis "floor" system of monetary control, in which changes to the Fed's monetary policy stance are mainly…
In the book I advertised in my last post, I argue that the Fed's decision to switch to a "floor"-type operating system "deepened and prolonged the Great Recession." Yet the Fed is only one of several central banks that have adopted floor systems for monetary control during…
Fed economists defending interest on reserves have recently called on an unexpected quarter by reviving interest in Milton Friedman’s 1969 essay, “The Optimum Quantity of Money.”[1] As Ben Bernanke and Don Kohn put it, “Before the Fed paid interest on reserves, banks engaged in wasteful and inefficient…
The Cat's Out of the Bag In September, when current Fed chair Janet Yellen held a press conference announcing details of the Fed's normalization plan, yours truly insisted that that plan reflected the Fed's "determination to maintain its current, bureaucratically advantageous operating system," in which monetary policy…