The way it was told, the US and worldwide economy in 2017 and for most of 2018 was absolutely on fire. Booming. They even came up with a name for it, calling the period “globally synchronized growth.” This was so good it was, everyone claimed, in danger of becoming too good. Inflation.To stay ahead of that monster, to keep the [...]
Economists’ R*, or R-star, is a fiction. It’s one that they came up with after-the-fact to try to explain why their policies didn’t actually work the way policymakers had initially promised. While in public, officials still speak glowingly of each QE, one after another after another, in private they know it deserves absolutely no praise. Study after study has shown [...]
One step forward, two steps back. Implicit in the Fed’s big strategy reviewed unveiled by Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell at the end of August was an admission that policymakers had screwed up. No minor detail, either, they have messed up big time on the big stuff. Though failing to be explicit about it is so infuriatingly cowardly, it’s at [...]
Toward the end of March 2012, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was busy with so many things. It wasn’t supposed to have been that way, not after two “massive” QE’s launched in the wake of the Great “Recession.” After all, V-shaped recoveries provide their own momentum upon which central bankers might piggy-back. In short, there shouldn’t have been any questions [...]
When it’s all over with, I think we’re going to find out we’ve all been unnecessarily harmed by two stochastic models. And in the greatest tragic irony of them all, it was entirely predictable. These statistical constructions can’t predict a thing, subject as they all are to GIGO limitations (Garbage In, Garbage Out). It’s the math which gives them the [...]
Why is everyone so angry? How can socialism possibly be on such a rise, particularly among younger people around the world? Why are Americans suddenly dying off? According to one study, two-thirds of millennials are convinced they are doing worse when compared to their parents’ generation. Sixty-two percent say they are living paycheck to paycheck, with no savings and no [...]
It is the inversion of the seventies. Four now five decades ago, the economy was caught in the grips of an inflationary condition it seemed unable to escape. It just went on and on, and while it was roaring officials up and down the spectrum assured us that they were doing their best, the only things that were able to [...]
The massive dollar eruption in the middle of 2014 altered everything. We’ve talked quite a lot about what Euro$ #3 did to China; it sent that economy into a dive from which it wouldn’t escape. And in doing so convinced the Chinese leadership to give growth one more try before changing the game entirely once stimulus inevitably failed. In many [...]
Things have changed, obviously. Chairman Powell and the rest of the FOMC, the majority anyway, have come around to rate cuts. Where they were hawkish in December, noncommittal as late as May, they’ve been spooked into them over the last month or so. As it stands, the first one is less than three weeks away. It’s not so much the [...]
First Bernanke, now Yellen. As I wrote earlier today, there is a growing tendency to revise economic history at least as it applies to official actions. Ben Bernanke defends QE from the perspective of 2009 forward, as if 2008 was all just someone else’s problem irrelevant to the world that came after. In effectively resigning from the Fed Chair position [...]
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