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…
If you haven't seen much of me on these pages lately, that's because I've spent most of the last few weeks feeding and grooming my favorite hobby horse: that's right, the Fed's policy of encouraging banks to hoard reserves by paying above-market rates on their Fed reserve…
Having considered the Fed's pre-crisis approach to monetary control, with its emphasis on interest-rate targets reached with the help of open-market operations, we must now come to grips with the quite different methods it has been employing since, and how the switch to them came about. The…
More than two hundred people came to Cato last Thursday, November 17th, for the 34th Annual Monetary Conference. Four panels and two keynote speakers covered “Central Banks and Financial Turmoil,” the theme of this year’s conference. In his introduction, CMFA’s James Dorn laid out some of the key…
In my recent Cato Institute policy analysis, “Requiem for QE,” I analyze the transcripts of the 2008 and 2009 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings in some detail. Among them, the March 2009 transcript stands out as particularly troubling, as it reveals the FOMC’s failure to appreciate…