Crowding Out Watch, Continued
The end of the semester has arrived, and as I prepared my last lecture, I checked to see how the government deficits had impacted yields. Real yields were pretty much as they were when the semester began in January.
Category Archives: financial markets
The contributions of Reinhart and Rogoff
With all the heated discussions of the last two weeks, it is important to keep perspective on which issues are in dispute and which are not. Let me state plainly something on which I think we ought to be agreed: Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff’s 2009 book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, is a valuable work of scholarship that continues to deserve study and praise from any thinking person. Here I review some of my reasons for saying that.
Fiscal tipping points
At the recent U.S. Monetary Policy Forum I presented the paper Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy, along with co-authors David Greenlaw (Managing Director and Chief U.S. Fixed Income Economist for Morgan Stanley), Peter Hooper (Managing Director and Chief Economist for Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.), and Frederic Mishkin (professor at Columbia University and former governor of the Federal Reserve). One of the goals of our research was to try to understand the events that can lead a country to a tipping point in which it faces rapid increases in the interest rate on its sovereign debt, as a result of which the country finds itself with an unmanageable fiscal burden.
Is this a good time to buy stocks?
With the stock market setting new 5-year highs, I was interested to take another look at some of the long-term fundamentals underlying equity values.
Understanding risk aversion in financial markets
At the economics meetings here in San Diego this weekend, I learned about some very interesting new research on one of the core questions in finance and macroeconomics that had long puzzled me.
U.S. government profits from AIG bailout
A key player in the financial crisis was insurance giant AIG, which sold a huge volume of credit default swaps supposedly protecting buyers of mortgage-backed securities from losses due to default. But AIG had nowhere near the capital necessary to honor these guarantees when things went bad, and much of AIG’s liabilities ended up being picked up by the Fed and the Treasury. On Tuesday the U.S. Treasury announced that it had sold the last of the common shares in AIG that it had acquired as compensation for its emergency assistance to AIG and reported that the Treasury and the Fed had together earned a profit of $22.7 billion as a result of their assistance to AIG. I was curious to take a look at how this story ended up having a happy ending.
Links for 2012-11-10
A few links to some items I found of interest.
Lost Decades: Two Years Later
The paperback edition of Lost Decades (W.W. Norton) is to be officially released October 1st. This seems as appropriate a juncture as any to assess the predictions Jeffry Frieden and I wrote almost two years ago.
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?
The Federal Reserve’s Maturity Extension Program and Treasury debt management
The Fed giveth and the Treasury taketh away.