Founded by Cato's vice president for monetary studies James A. Dorn in 1983, the Cato Institute's Annual Monetary Conference has kept the monetary policy conversation alive in Washington, DC, for nearly four decades — even at times when a calcified consensus made the topic seem unimportant. The…
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…
I have chosen a provocative title, but it is fully justified. Fed officials are flying on autopilot, but the controls don't work anymore, or at least not reliably. Fed watchers are largely clueless. The investment community and the economy may be collateral damage. Let me begin by…