That’s the question posed in an interesting new paper by UCSD Professor Takeo Hoshi and University of Tokyo Professor Takatoshi Ito.
Category Archives: deficits
The Federal Reserve’s Maturity Extension Program and Treasury debt management
The Fed giveth and the Treasury taketh away.
Guest Contribution: “The Making of America’s Imbalances”
Today we are fortunate to have a Paul Wachtel (NYU) and Moritz Schularick (Free University of Berlin) as guest contributors. This article is based upon their paper of the same title.
The fiscal cliff and rationality
What should happen, what could happen, and what will happen?
The Fiscal Cliff, and the Enduring Legacy of EGTRRA/JGTRRA and a Certain Discretionary Spending Measure Starting in 2003
The CBO recently released a document that places our current policy dilemma in context (Changes in CBO’s Baseline Projections Since January 2001, June 7, 2012).
Links for 2012-06-27
Quick links to another proposal for Europe, and estimates of U.S. consumer benefits from lower natural gas and gasoline prices.
Europe in 1931
I was at a conference at the Cato Institute two weeks ago discussing some research by Dartmouth Professor Doug Irwin on the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression of 1929-1933. If you’re interested, you can see a written version of my comments, the slides from my presentation, or a video of the session (my comments begin a little more than half way in). Here I’d like to relate some of the discussion of what happened in Europe in 1931, and comment on some of the parallels with what is going on today.
Options for Europe
This problem is not fixing itself.
Markets see bad news
May was a bad month for U.S. stocks. June started out worse, with the S&P500 on Friday down 9% from where it stood at the beginning of May. That puts us back about where we started the year in January, though still significantly above last fall’s lows.
Should the Fed do more?
Johns Hopkins University Professor Larry Ball, Princeton Professor Paul Krugman, U.C. Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong, University of Oregon Professor Tim Duy and Texas State University Professor David Beckworth are among those recently arguing that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is neglecting his own earlier academic insights into what the central bank should be doing in a situation such as the United States presently finds itself. Here’s what I think they’re overlooking.