There was a wonderful story in today’s WSJ about how some big banks managed to lose some of their hard-earned TARP money.
Category Archives: financial markets
More on disaggregate bank landing
I’d like to mention two more useful analyses of the disaggregated behavior of bank lending over the last year. The first is from James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario, and the second is a new research paper by Silvio Contessi
and Johanna Francis.
More on bank lending data
Further evidence on the decline in bank lending.
High Anxiety (about Interest and Inflation Rates)
In March 2001, I was tasked to follow developments in Japanese macro policy (including monetary, exchange rate, and banking recapitalization issues). Readers will be tempted to ask what this has to do with current events. Well, at the time, Japan was facing rapidly rising net debt-to-GDP ratios (rising from 60.4 ppts of GDP to 84.6 ppts from 2000 to 2005), and was embarking upon a policy of quantitative easing in an attempt to stave off a deep recession. And yet opponents of quantitative easing worried about hyper-inflation, even as y/y inflation at the time remained mired in the negative range. I didn’t understand the fears at the time; and I still don’t. Now flash forward eight years, and move across the Pacific.
More papers on the credit crunch
Links to some interesting papers that I recently read.
Two Books
…and the Financial and Economic Crisis
I don’t read very many books. At least not during the academic year. But I have read two books recently that are quite germane to thinking about the buildup to the financial crisis, and thinking about how to respond to the current economic downturn. The first is Akerlof and Shiller’s Animal Spirits. The second one is actually not yet out — it’s Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market (I got a prepublication copy; here’s a hint of it). They are both important books, well worth reading.
The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report Is Out
Tables 1.3 and 1.4 (tables) in Chapter 1 bear particularly close attention, although the entire text is useful.
Robert DeYoung on payday loans
I thought this was an interesting editorial in Tuesday’s WSJ.
Macroeconomic Schisms
There has been a lot of breast-beating in the press and in the blogosphere about how economists failed to discern the possibility that not all was going well in the years leading up the current financial and economic crisis [1]. I think the notion that all economists were blithely optimistic has been dispelled (well, okay, here’s a couple of exceptions: Dan Gross h/t Free Exchange, A. Kaletsky). At the risk of some gross simplifications, I will speculate that there was —
until recently — less optimism among academic macroeconomists than Wall Street economists. There was probably less anxiety among
say finance professors who focused on asset pricing (as opposed those who worked in banking) than macroeconomists (Dani Rodrik highlights the diversity). One divide that
I think is not particularly relevant in locating the source of the crisis is the most well known one — specifically whether prices
are sticky.
In my opinion, the big divide in thinking relates to how economists conceive of financial markets working. This is a divide that cuts across other divides. For instance, the Hicksian
decomposition (IS-LM), in its simplest incarnation, treats the financial world as one wherein bonds are identical, and the only means of borrowing; there is no separate channel for lending, say via bank loans, to influence aggregate demand (see this post for the many channels of monetary policy). In the real business cycle literature, and many New Keynesian DSGE models, there is a representative bond (and lending rate) which summarizes the asset markets (see Camilo Tovar’s survey of DSGEs for a discussion).
The Demise of the Dollar? Should We Worry about Quantitative Easing and Deficit Spending?
Over the weekend, I was working on my long delayed manuscript on exchange rate modeling [0], and pondering how useful the conventional econometric techniques were for making predictions about the future value of the dollar.