Bruce Bartlett reminds us of the George W. Bush: Screwup-in-Chief, 2001-2008. Short version: Iraq, WMD, unfunded Medicare Part D, Sarbanes-Oxley, Katrina, Harriet Miers, no vetos until second term, tax rebates+credits and nonpermanent tax cuts, steel tariffs, ag subsidies, keeping Cheney, compassionate conservativism, signing McCain-Feingold after threatening to veto, neutering SecTreas, and GSEs.
Author Archives: Menzie Chinn
Guest Contribution: Should central banks target higher rates of inflation?
By Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Johannes Wieland
Today, we’re fortunate to have Oli Coibion, and Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Professors of Economics at William and Mary and at UC Berkeley, respectively, and Johannes Wieland, Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, as a Guest Contributors.
The Return of Portfolio Balance Models: “The Large Scale Asset Purchases Had Large International Effects”
In a new working paper, the St. Louis Fed’s Christopher Neely argues The Large Scale Asset Purchases Had Large International Effects.
The Federal Reserve’s large scale asset purchases (LSAP) of agency debt,
MBSs and long-term U.S. Treasuries not only reduced long-term U.S. bond yields also
significantly reduced long-term foreign bond yields and the spot value of the dollar. …
A Comment on Keith Hennessey’s Deficit Defense
In this post, Keith Hennessey takes issue with President Obama’s assertion there were spiraling deficits during the President G.W. Bush years. He presents this graph.
Thinking about Trade and Trade Costs
One of the big issues facing policymakers around the world is the evolution of the pattern and volume of international trade flows. I recently participated in a very useful conference that included a number of papers that shed light on this important question. The conference, “Trade Costs and International Trade Integration — Past, Present and Future,” organized by Dennis Novy (Warwick University), David Jacks (Simon Fraser University), and Christopher Meissner (University of California, Davis), and sponsored by the UK’s ESRC, and the University of Warwick’s CAGE.
Measuring the Trilemma (with Special Reference to China)
Yesterday, Greg Mankiw discussed the trilemma in international finance, noting that countries can trade off between capital mobility, monetary policy autonomy, and exchange rate stability, but cannot fully all three of those objectives at a given time. In this post, Hiro Ito cites work with Joshua Aizenman and myself, in which we quantified how countries have traded off these objectives over time (paper here).
Michael Rosenberg: Is the Euro Embarking on a New Long-Term Cycle of Currency Weakness?
From Bloomberg’s Mike Rosenberg, in FX Market Insights (June 28):
The euro is now two years into what might be another
long-term downtrend. …
May Global Surface Mean Temp Anomalies
I await June figures with bated breath. From NOAA:
Still in Search of Inflationary Expectations
Given concerns about large budget deficits and quantitative easing feeding into inflation even as actual inflation was falling, I wondered what standard measures indicated. This follows up on the same question I posed in May of last year.
A Specter is Haunting America
…The specter of fiscal mindlessness
I’m just back from two weeks in Europe. During that time, growth indicators have signaled a slowdown [0] in the midst of a massive negative output gap [1], while a substantial bloc in the Congress refuses to think in a sensible fashion about fiscal policy. This point is most forcefully illustrated by the inability of the Senate to move forward on extending unemployment insurance. (It makes me wonder if some were asking the question, “Are there no poorhouses?”)