Nearly a year ago, Jeffry Frieden and I called for Conditional Inflation Targeting. Today, policy seems to have turned toward that direction. From today’s statement from the FOMC:
Category Archives: Federal Reserve
Trillion dollar platinum coin
Here’s one of the wilder suggestions floating around for what the President could do if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling.
Links for 2012-11-10
A few links to some items I found of interest.
Fat fingers and the price of oil
Can the wild swings in the price of oil over the last few weeks have anything to do with supply and demand?
Effects of QE3
On Thursday the Federal Reserve announced a series of measures that will come to be referred to as a third round of “quantitative easing,” or QE3. Here I review what effects this is intended to have and some of the developments so far.
Woodford and QE3
Columbia University Professor Michael Woodford’s paper at the Fed’s Jackson Hole conference last week made the case that more large-scale asset purchases by the Fed would by themselves do nothing, and suggested that instead what really matters is the Fed’s communication of its future intentions. There’s a fair bit in Woodford’s analysis that I agree with. But unlike Woodford, I think that asset purchases can be an important part of what the Fed could do in the here and now. Here I explain why.
The gold standard and economic growth
Tyler Cowen acknowledges that the gold standard as implemented in 1929-1932 was a disaster, and that a gold standard would also work very poorly in the presence of the big changes in the real value of gold over the last decade. But in the interests of promoting a balanced discussion, he asks:
Dare anyone critical of the gold standard bring themselves to utter these (roughly true) words?: “For the Western world, the gold standard era, defined say as 1815-1913, was arguably the greatest period of human advance ever, at least in matters of economics, culture, and technology.”
Here are my thoughts on Tyler’s question.
Return to the gold standard
Several sources reported that the 2012 Republican Platform would call for a commission to explore the possibility of the U.S. returning to a gold standard. However, the final document makes no mention of gold, and instead seems to have settled on a proposal that is unlikely to do any harm:
President Reagan, shortly after his inauguration,
established a commission to consider the feasibility
of a metallic basis for U.S. currency. The
commission advised against such a move. Now, three
decades later, as we face the task of cleaning up the
wreckage of the current Administration’s policies, we
propose a similar commission to investigate possible
ways to set a fixed value for the dollar.
I thought it would be worthwhile to review some of the reasons why we should be thankful that saner heads seem to have prevailed.
U.S. monetary policy since the financial crisis
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced on Thursday that it had sold the last remaining securities from its Maiden Lane III portfolio, successfully closing the chapter on its assistance to insurance giant AIG. I thought this would be a good occasion to review the various measures that the Fed implemented over the last 5 years– what they were attended to accomplish, what they did accomplish, and the significance of Thursday’s announcement.
Guest Contribution: Innocent Bystanders? Monetary Policy in the U.S. and Inequality
Today, we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Olivier Coibion (UT Austin) [interviewed here by Prakash Loungani], Yuriy Gorodnichenko (UC Berkeley), Lorenz Kueng (Northwestern) and John Silvia (Wells Fargo); it is based on IMF Working Paper No. 199