After the Greenspan fiasco, when Rep. Henry Gonzalez caught him fibbing about recordings of Fed minutes (Greenspan denied that the Fed kept them, but actually did meticulously record and transcribe them), the Fed agreed to release the minutes with a five year lag. They’ve finally released minutes from 2007–the year the crisis began.
We knew they were clueless as US financial markets bubbled to the greatest speculative peak ever from 2000 to 2006, and we knew the Fed waited far too long to act like a central banker when the crisis hit. Now we know that even after the crisis hit, they remained clueless.Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Fed Minutes Reveal FOMC Was Clueless As Economy Crashed In 2007
L. Randall Wray
Clueless command system sitting on top of the economy, the worst of all worlds.
SCARY!
ReplyDeleteWe are in the same position right now if something bad starts to happen....
rsp,
they are not clueless they are culpable for the actions and should be prosecuted, the charter says for the wealfare of the american people, last time I checked 47 million people were on food stamps.
ReplyDeleteBob, lay that at the feet of the president and justice department, as well as Congress, all of whom refused to investigate seriously and ruled out prosecution.
ReplyDeleteI tweeted Yglesias yesterday about the 2007 FOMC transcripts (mucha_carlos if anyone wants me to watch me lob bombs at people on twitter):
ReplyDeleteits a pity no one said, 'you know a trade deficit $500B larger than the budget deficit is CRAZY' #pagingwynnegodley
FOMC Was Clueless as economy crashed?
ReplyDeleteHo, hum! Congressional Record shows Congress was - if anything - far more clueless throughout the same period.
Administration? Clueless.
SCOTUS? Clueless.
Voting records of electorate shows that they - overall - were clueless enough to vote in the Congress/Administration appointing additional clueless.
Where do the clues end? Elementary school teachers? Or their curriculum planning committees in local school boards?
Is there a CICC complex operating there too?
[Curriculum-Industrial Contracting & Congressional complex?]
@beowulf
ReplyDeleteYglesias cannot acknowledge your point, because it would shatter his pro-Fed/monetarist image. People would quckly see he doesn't actually understand a damned thing, he just parrots what the Great And Powerful say and pretends it makes him economically savvy.
Wait till we see what they were talking about when the 2008 minutes come out next year!
ReplyDeleteGuarantee: They sized QE1 at 1.3T because that was the size of the commercial paper market/"shadow" banking system before the GFC; their logic: "we'll just increase reserves by 1.3T and then banks can just lend out the reserves instead of the "shadow" banks.... Good idea!"
rsp,