Most of what passes for modern monetary policy is nothing more than one assumption piled upon another (and then another, and so on). Taken for granted for so long, rarely are these unproven precepts ever challenged to justify themselves to the minimal standard of internal consistency, let alone prove discrete validity by parts. The latest is “helicopter money”, another sham [...]
In April 2008, Nassim Taleb was becoming a household name criticizing the quant dominance in finance. Bear Stearns had just failed and the entire edifice of mathematical order was still breaking down, as the last bastions of credit default swap “supply”, the monoline insurers, were still rumored to be heading for insolvency (while the nightly news focused on whether that [...]
If one were to measure the US economy by what it is, right now, there would be so little growth or activity as to question the actual cycle. In fact, about the only factor that seems to be out of recession is the expectation for the second half of the year (which is already trimmed from the “slump” sticking to [...]
There is a lot to be gained from a detailed understanding of history, an obvious statement I know, but one that is so very underappreciated in the economic context. For what little passes as historical “study” today, even less is accounted on the economic side. I have little doubt, in marveling at that, politics and ideology accounts for much of [...]
The only surprise, inasmuch as it was the most unspecified ahead of time, from this morning’s ECB announcement was the terms of the new “targeted” LTRO’s. According to the press conference, the terms will allow European banks to borrow from the ECB up to 7% of the total amount of each bank’s loans to the European nonfinancial private sector, with [...]
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