I’ve been reading Amity Shlaes’ wonderful book, The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression, with an eye out for parallels and lessons for our current crisis. You will find some of those and much, much more. Amity showed great restraint in writing her book. A scholar with her expertise could have driven [...]
Financial TV is full of talk about Governor Warsh’s opinion piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. One theory is that it was a shot across Chairman Bernanke’s bow. I doubt it, but even if it was in some limited sense, my experience on the FOMC for almost 14 years suggests to me that the following [...]
A: No, Not directly, but Yes Indirectly. Channeling the FOMC I remember once when the head of the trading desk at the New York Fed was giving his report on international operations, the FOMC broke into applause when he announced that there had been no dollar intervention during the past year. While fixed exchange [...]
I was about to "go to press" with the title and article that follows when I heard of the reappointment. Topics are too precious to waste; so I'm going with it anyway. Congratulations to President Obama for his good judgment. Congratulations to Ben, who must be thinking that no good deed goes unpunished. Should Bernanke [...]
I sat in on a presentation this week where a picture of the Fed's balance sheet growth was shown as prima facie evidence that inflation looms down the road. The presenter wasn't sure when inflation would arrive, but it would arrive and be caused by the balance sheet expansion. No chain of causality was laid [...]
Yesterday, I defended Gentle Ben Bernanke. I said I believed him when he said he didn’t say something and said it would have been appropriate if he had. Or, something like that. A committee of Congress had his partner in non-crime on the hot seat today accusing him of saying something he had already acknowledge [...]
(Or a big part of it anyway) I sat next to Ben Bernanke for almost three years at the FOMC table when he served as a Fed Governor. This was before he became Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors and later returned as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal [...]
Last Friday I was on The Kudlow Report to discuss the proposal that the Fed be audited in connection with the question of any inappropriate influence applied by Chairman Bernanke on Mr. Lewis of the Bank of America in connection with the Merrill acquisition. I may follow up in a separate post on some of the [...]
Just to catch you up on what's been going on, I recently had two good discussions on CNBC about the Fed and the markets. On June 23rd I commented on why implementing a Fed exit strategy may be premature, and on the 24th I responded to questions about Chairman Bernanke's likely role in the BOA/Merrill Lynch affair.
Today's (06-23-09) Wall Street Journal editorial page, of which I'm a fan, contains a fascinating look back at the monetary policy debate in December 2003. During the FOMC meeting on December 9, 2003, then Governor Bernanke referred to a WSJ editorial of that same day (Speed Demons at the Fed) that wondered if the FOMC [...]