Posts Tagged ‘QE’

The Bond Market Won’t Allow An End To QE Any Time Soon

A couple of days ago I linked to this article which suggested that were Hayek alive today he might well counsel to proceed with caution in its use of unconventional policies, e.g. QE. The gist of the piece was that economists, indeed all social scientists, tend to certitude based on quantitative models which are anything […]

Where Do Illiquid Credit Markets Lead?

It’s axiomatic that the real news and analysis that matters most gets buried in the stuff that moves the needle for the radio and TV cable news networks. Case in point today is this extraordinarily good article by Felix Salmon. Let me excerpt a bit of his writing with an explanation to follow. Liquidity is […]

QE As Conventional Policy

QUANTITATIVE easing, which almost no one had heard of five years ago, is the great new discovery in macroeconomic policy. Policymakers put their faith in it as the engine of recovery; variations in the quantity of money supplied by the central bank has graduated from an emergency measure to a permanent tool. As Adam Posen recently […]

Exiting QE Under False Pretenses

As the exceptionally well-informed readers of this little blog know, the Fed has signaled that once the unemployment rate reaches 6.5% it will declare “Mission Accomplished” and begin to unwind it’s various monetary stimulus programs. As this little snippet from the WSJ blog points out, getting to that magic number doesn’t necessarily mean that everything […]

Fed Fighting The Recession That’s Over

Lots of people and pundits are having fun with the NBER’s announcement of the end of the Recession. The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met yesterday by conference call. At its meeting, the committee determined that a trough in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in June 2009. […]

A “Social Depression” That Only The Fed Can Cure

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is out with a new post suggesting that the US is perilously close to political gridlock which is preventing the Fed from engaging in more QE and putting the country at risk of sliding into a “Japanese trap.” His prescription calls for the Fed to make massive bond purchases but with a twist: […]