As the 2020 presidential election season heats up, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is being pushed from all sides. President Trump has castigated him for overly tight monetary policy and has implied that Powell is a “bigger enemy” than Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, William Dudley, who recently headed…
Thanks to President's Trump's picks for prospective Fed Board nominees, the subject of gold price targeting (or a gold "price rule") is getting attention once again. The idea, which got a lot of attention back in the 1980s, after Arthur Laffer and other supply-siders, including Alan Reynolds,…
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s decision in December to raise the federal funds target by 25 basis points, to 2.25–2.50 percent, and to continue raising rates at least twice in the new year, upset financial markets. The Dow and S&P each dropped at least 8.7 percent, logging their…
So it has come to pass. In his recent press conference, Chairman Jerome Powell has at last made official the Fed's plan to stick to its post-crisis "floor" system of monetary control, which uses changes in the interest rate paid on banks' excess reserve balances, rather than…
Last weekend the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosted its annual symposium in Jackson Hole. Despite being the Fed’s largest annual event, the symposium has been “fairly boring” for years, in terms of what can be learned about the future of actual policy. This year’s program,…