Having had a lot to say on these pages concerning the Fed's past Main Street lending efforts, I thought it proper to put in my 2 cents concerning its current plan, by responding to the Fed's request for comments on it. Unfortunately, "2 cents" is an all…
One of the more controversial provisions of the CARES Act consists of the $454 billion it allows the U.S. Treasury to devote to "backstopping" (that is, to supplying partial funding for) the Federal Reserve's emergency lending. In a previous post, I argued that these Treasury backstops help…
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,…
The Community Reinvestment Act is supposed to ensure that banks lend to low- and moderate-income households wherever they operate. But there are reasons to doubt its effectiveness. In the Washington Post this summer, I reported findings (from a forthcoming paper with Andrew Forrester) that more than two-thirds…