Fed Chair Ben Bernanke’s observations on monetary policy and the housing bubble have received a lot of attention. Like many other commentators (e.g., Arnold Kling, Paul Krugman, and Free Exchange), I agree with Bernanke’s conclusions, but only up to a point.
Category Archives: Federal Reserve
Guest Contribution: Monetary Policy and Asset Bubbles in 2010
By Joseph E. Gagnon
Today, we’re fortunate to have Joe Gagnon, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as a guest contributor.
In his speech at the American Economic Association yesterday, Ben Bernanke said that monetary policy played at most a small role in the U.S. housing bubble and that financial regulatory policy is the appropriate tool for preventing harmful asset price bubbles in the future. I agree with these conclusions, but I suspect that many do not, even within the world of central banking.
Term deposit facility
On Monday the Federal Reserve proposed a new term deposit facility that would allow the Fed to borrow directly from private institutions. Here I offer some thoughts on how this fits into the Fed’s long-term plans and what its implications for the rest of us might be.
What went wrong and how can we fix it?
That’s the title of an article I wrote for the UCSD Economics Department’s Economics in Action, which I reproduce below.
Should the Fed be the nation’s bubble fighter?
That’s a question recently taken up by
the Wall Street Journal. Here are my thoughts.
Commodity prices and the Fed
I’ve been discussing possible explanations for the recent tendency of the dollar prices of commodities to move together. On Friday we received a very useful data point for distinguishing between the different hypotheses.
Commodity inflation
Why are the prices of so many commodities rising in an economy that seems to remain quite weak?
Guest Contribution: The Liquidity Trap Does Not Make Monetary Policy Ineffective
By Joseph E. Gagnon
Today, we’re fortunate to have Joe Gagnon, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as a guest contributor.
Improving financial regulation and supervision
There were some other very interesting presentations at the conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston last week. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke spoke on Financial Regulation and Supervision after the Crisis while Princeton Professor Alan Blinder’s message was It’s Broke, Let’s Fix It: Rethinking Financial Regulation. Here I summarize four key reforms these speakers addressed.
Evaluating the new tools of monetary policy
Last week I participated in a conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, at which I discussed the new lending programs and asset acquisitions pursued by the Federal Reserve over the last two years. Previously I shared with Econbrowser readers empirical evidence on the effects these targeted liquidity operations seem to have had. Below I reproduce my remarks from the conference on the underlying motivation for using such measures, in which I suggested that the critical question is what was the underlying cause of the financial stress to which the Fed was responding. I distinguished between two possible interpretations of how the financial crisis arose.