Kenneth S. Rogoff stands out as the advocate of restricting hand-to-hand currency who has argued the case most comprehensively and probably the most cautiously. I critically reviewed his recent book, The Curse of Cash, in the May 2017 issue of Econ Journal Watch. Here I summarize highlights…
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,…
Lately, there have been a lot of discussions in the media and in the academic sphere surrounding banks’ net interest margin in the low (or negative) interest rate environment. I have explained before how lowering interest rates below a certain threshold led to "margin compression" (see here), which…
"Helicopter money" started out as, and long remained, nothing more than a heuristic device — and a brazenly counterfactual one at that — employed by monetary economists as a means for gaining a better theoretical understanding of the consequences of changes in the stock of money. "Suppose,"…
Sartre famously wrote, "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (“Hell is other people"). In his recent speech, Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, assisted, as he says, by William English of the Board's staff, supplies an example of hell being the "other policy." The last substantive paragraph of Fischer’s speech…