I was astonished when I heard that the Fed is contemplating
increasing the Term Auction Facility to $900 billion. I wanted to take another look at the ever-changing balance sheet of the Fed to see how logistically Bernanke might be able to perform such a feat.
Category Archives: financial markets
How Bad Will the Downturn Be? Stylized Facts
The IMF released several chapters of the World Economic Outlook; one chapter entitled Financial Stress and Economic Downturns provides some insights into the ramifications of the current financial turmoil.
Roundtable discussion on the financial crisis
I participated on Friday with several other UCSD faculty members (including Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz) in a discussion about the current economic crisis. If you have RealPlayer, you can view the discussion here, though I recommend fast-forwarding to skip the first 8 introductory minutes to get to the actual discussion. If you just want my slides, I’ve posted them here.
Understanding the TED spread
One measure that is being used to summarize the strain in financial markets is the TED spread. This is calculated as the gap between 3-month LIBOR (an average of interest rates offered in the London interbank market for 3-month dollar-denominated loans) and the 3-month Treasury bill rate. The size of this gap presumably reflects some sort of risk or liquidity premium. I was interested to break the TED spread down into identifiable components to try to get a better understanding of what may be responsible for its recent behavior.
Gross domestic income and recessions
The “final” values for 2008:Q2 GDP released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis on Friday were more disappointing than the earlier estimates. Still, the 2.8% annual growth rate for real GDP that we’re now told characterized the second quarter doesn’t sound like a recession. Or does it?
Does House Republican Resistance Make Sense for Their Constituency?
From the Justin Fox, regarding House Republicans’ plan:
…that of the House Republican Study Committee, seems to be a joke. It calls for a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax to “encourag[e] corporations to sell unwanted assets.” But the toxic mortgage securities clogging up bank balance sheets are worth less now than when they were acquired. Meaning that no capital gains tax would be owed on them anyway. If you repealed the tax, banks would have even less incentive to sell them because they wouldn’t be able use the losses to offset capital gains elsewhere. Seriously, where do these people come up with this stuff?
Eric Cantor, the Republican chief deputy whip, has a more reasonable-sounding if still pretty vague plan to insure more mortgages rather than buy mortgage securities. ….
I’m in agreement with Justin that guaranteeing even more mortgages won’t be any better than the original Paulson plan.
My observation here is that the obstructionism of this group is either a manifestion of denial of reality, or a sheer indifference to the needs of their constituents — to the extent that House Republicans purport to represent small business Main Street.
The Financial Crisis and Entrepreneurship
Most of the discussion surrounding the current crisis has focused on the implications for major businesses and their hiring and investment decisions, or households and their employment possibilities, or consumer behavior. One overlooked (or underemphasized) aspect of the issue is the impact on small firms. Fortunately, my former colleague (and coauthor), Rob Fairlie has just published a book that can inform one’s thinking on this subject.
Who’ll Be the Next Treasury Secretary?
As the Congress was debating how much power and how many hundreds of billions to the US Treasury, I was pondering who would be in charge of all that come January 20th.
“The government’s bailout efforts” on MPR
This morning, I had the pleasure of discussing this issue with GMU’s Russell Robert on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show. The link is here.
Brad DeLong on Bernanke and Paulson
Brad DeLong had some insightful and amusing observations on the priorities of Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. I can’t resist reproducing Brad’s comments with some annotations of my own.