permanent zero

With two recent Fed governors - Tarullo and Brainard - expressing a need for caution with normalizing Fed policy, I wanted to break down how I tend to think about monetary policy and its affect on resource allocation and private portfolio…

Yesterday was a big conference day in Washington, D.C., with the IMF and World Bank meeting and with the Brookings Institution holding an event featuring the Greek and German finance ministers. While I attended the Brookings event, the…

Through the lens of someone looking at economies with rapidly ageing populations we can simply say that this problem arises because there isn't any consumption to pull forward! Fisher's interest theory was always valid, it is merely that in…

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, policy makers’ aversion to fiscal policy is still large. So monetary policy rules the roost. With developed economies burdened by low growth, unemployment, and high levels of debt, monetary agents…

Recently, I wrote a series of posts predicting that the Fed would give up on QE and move toward forward guidance in order to be able to normalize policy. Nevertheless, I have also been saying for quite some time I believe the US zero rate…

Long-term interest rates are largely a reflection of expected future short-term future interest rates plus a term premium. So when you see yields move up, it reflects either an increase in term premiums from uncertainty or a change in the…

The Fed will be stuck at zero for a very long time, perhaps forever. Investors who are anticipating the Fed's tightening are premature in their assessment of when rate hikes can reasonably occur. Ben Bernanke and other Fed members have made…

The following are today's prepared remarks of the Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the US Congress by US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. While the totality of Chairman Bernanke's remarks are not new, we have underlined and…

Retail savers in the US are abandoning certificates of deposits (CDs). The amount of CDs outstanding that are $100K or smaller has been on a sharp decline since the recession and is now at the lowest level since the Fed began keeping track…

Quick note here on the US and the UK to change things up a bit from the Cyprus obsession.