Senior U.S. Department of Justice officials overruled internal recommendations to prosecute global bank HSBC Holdings Plc for money-laundering violations because of concerns about the stability of the financial system, according to a congressional report released on Monday.…Business Insider
Several new articles have appeared in the last few weeks in the major media outlets expressing surprise that central banks have had little effect on economic growth despite the rather massive buildup of their ‘balance sheets’ via various types of quantitative easing programs. I have indicated before that I am coming to the view that most of the media, politicians, central bankers and other likely types (IMF and European Commission officials etc) seem to be in a constant state of ‘surprise’ as each day of reality fails to confirm what they said yesterday or last week (allowing for lags :-)). What a group of surprised people we have to effectively run our nations on behalf of capital. Poor souls, constantly be shocked out of their certainties. That is what Groupthink does – creates mobs that deny reality until it smacks them so hard in the face that they can only utter “that was surprising!” And in that context, the latest media trend appears to be something along the lines of ‘well let’s get the turbines moving’ or ‘those helicopters are about to launch’ and when we read that and what follows we learn that the media input into our lives only reinforces the smokescreen of ignorance that we conduct our daily lives within.…Bill Mitchell – billy blog
…the whole point of monetary policy is to stabilize output. For monetary policy to work, it needs to able to reliably offset lower than normal spending in other areas with stronger than normal investment spending. If after six years of extraordinarily stimulative monetary policy (and extraordinarily high corporate profits), business investment is just “where one would expect given that the overall recovery has been disappointing,” that’s a sign of failure, not of success.Is the conclusion that monetary policy was wrong (should have been tighter), or that it was not up to the job. Those advocating for the primacy of fiscal policy would argue for the latter.
I didn’t leave the Republican Party. I felt that the party left me.The interesting thing is that many of the current crop will say, Good riddance to a RINO.
I'll end with two concrete proposals. First, negotiations over Greece's evidently unsustainable debt burden should be based on explicit assumptions about European growth. If European growth turns out to be weaker than projected, which in turn would make it tougher for Greece to grow, then Greece should be allowed greater leeway after the fact in meeting its fiscal targets.Brookings — Ben Bernanke's Blog
Second, it's time for the leaders of the euro zone to address the problem of large and sustained trade imbalances (either surpluses or deficits), which, in a fixed-exchange-rate system like the euro zone, impose significant costs and risks. For example, the Stability and Growth Pact, which imposes rules and penalties with the goal of limiting fiscal deficits, could be extended to reference trade imbalances as well. Simply recognizing officially that creditor as well as debtor countries have an obligation to adjust over time (through fiscal and structural measures, for example) would be an important step in the right direction.
I do wish Ben Bernanke all the best in his new jobs at Citadel and PIMCO and Brookings. I’m sure his new employers have a different perspective on decisions taken during the financial crisis than my own.Interfluidity
"It's generous of the WSJ writers to note, as they do, that "economic forecasting isn't easy." They should know, since the Journal has been forecasting a breakout in inflation and a collapse in the dollar at least since 2006, when the FOMC decided not to raise the federal funds rate above 5-1/4 percent."
"I am waiting for the WSJ to argue for a well-structured program of public infrastructure development, which would support growth in the near term by creating jobs and in the longer term by making our economy more productive. We shouldn't be giving up on monetary policy, which for the past few years has been pretty much the only game in town as far as economic policy goes. Instead, we should be looking for a better balance between monetary and other growth-promoting policies, including fiscal policy."Way to go, Ben.
As no one interested in macroeconomics has failed to notice, Ben Bernanke is having a debate with Larry Summers on what’s behind the slow recovery of growth rates since the financial crisis of 2007.
To Bernanke it’s basically a question of a savings glut.
To Summers it’s basically a question of a secular decline in the level of investment.Lars P. Syll’s Blog
To me the debate is actually a non-starter, since they both rely on a loanable funds theory and a Wicksellian notion of a “natural” rate of interest — ideas that have been known to be dead wrong for at least 80 years …
In his remarks at Princeton University Baccalaureate Ceremony in June 2013, several months before he left office, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and an eminent economist Ben Bernanke released into the world this frank insight:Economic Sociology and Political Economy“Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.“
QE is seen by its adherents, such as former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, as both the panacea to heal the post-global financial crisis world and also the factor whose absence was the main cause of the Great Depression. This is in line with their view that central banks create currency for commercial banks to then lend on to borrowers and that this stimulates both asset values and also consumption, which then underpin and fuel the various stages of the expected recovery, encouraging banks to create even more money by lending to both businesses and individuals as a virtuous cycle of expansion unfolds.CNBC — Central Banks
The theory sounds great.
However it has one tiny flaw. It's nonsense.
