Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke defended QE3 at his September 13 press conference by arguing that it would lower mortgage rates and increase home prices.  Over 80% of U.S. household debt is mortgage debt, so the extent to which he is right could be of considerable consequence to the future path of economic recovery.  Read more »

In his Path to Prosperity, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan called for $40 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, $7 trillion less than President Obama called for in his 2013 budget.  What accounts for the gap? $1 trillion is from Medicaid and other health programs. Another $1.4 trillion comes from anticipated (wished for?) interest-cost savings ($4.3 trillion compared with $5.7 trillion).  So where does Ryan make his really big cuts? “Other” mandatory spending.  $631 billion was spent on these programs in 2011, though Ryan proposes paring this to only $349 billion by 2018.  Over ten years, Ryan slashes a whopping $3.5 trillion vis-à-vis Obama, targets unspecified, from this large and broad category, which includes political minefields like unemployment compensation, retirement benefits, earned income and child tax credits, food assistance, and veteran benefits.  This sounds a lot like a New Year’s pledge to cut 1,000 calories a day from the category of “meals.” Read more »

“Tax expenditures” are an opaque form of government spending that operates through the tax code – instead of the government making direct payments to individuals or institutions, tax credits are issued.  In total, they cost the U.S. government about $1.1 trillion annually – roughly equivalent to the country’s enormous budget deficit. Read more »

The Fed has a dual mandate to pursue price stability and maximum employment.  How should these be defined?  In January, the Fed set itself a long-run inflation target of 2%, while in June the midpoint of Fed board members’ and Reserve Bank presidents’ long-run unemployment predictions was 5.6%.  Our figure above shows actual inflation and unemployment performance relative to these targets going back to 2002.  What stands out is the divergence that opens up, particularly on the unemployment front, after Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008.  The sum of the deviations reached its peak in July 2009, as shown in the small box in the upper left of the figure.  Though it has since declined fairly steadily, it is still well above zero – zero being a benchmark for fulfilling the combined mandate.  This suggests that the Fed’s doves should continue to hold the upper hand. Read more »

Central bankers necessarily spend a great deal of time studying economic and market data that they believe to be forward-looking indicators of the economy’s health.  One such is the so-called “LIBOR-OIS spread” – the spread between the London Interbank Offered Rate (the rate at which major banks can supposedly borrow from each other, unsecured by collateral, for three months) and the Overnight Indexed Swap rate Read more »

Barclays’ admission that it deliberately understated the interest rates at which it could borrow between September 2007 and May 2009 suggests grievous flaws in the widespread process of using LIBOR (the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate) as a benchmark off which to price commercial loans, mortgages, and other forms of lending.  Our figure above illustrates this by comparing LIBOR with so-called NYFR Read more »

Back in July 2010, we produced a post examining the “Icelandic Post-Crisis Miracle,” as proclaimed by Paul Krugman.  We showed that Krugman’s “miracle” was merely an artifact of comparing changes in Iceland’s real GDP with that of Estonia, Ireland, and Latvia since the strategically chosen 4th quarter of 2007. Read more »

When the Federal Reserve’s Open Markets Committee (FOMC) last met in April, the unemployment rate was on a declining path – having fallen to 8.2% in March from 9.1% the previous August.  Against this backdrop, the Committee was modestly sanguine on prospects for job growth going forward.  “The unemployment rate will decline gradually,” it predicted, “towards levels that it judges to be consistent with its dual mandate,” without need for new monetary stimulus measures. Read more »

The so-called Taylor Rule in monetary policy suggests how the Federal Reserve should adjust interest rates based on movements in inflation and economic output.  Although the Fed has never explicitly followed such a rule, it described fairly well the path of interest rate policy under much of Alan Greenspan’s tenure as chairman. Read more »

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence measure has, since its inception in 1967, been a perfect predictor of presidential incumbent election performance.  As shown in the large figure above, every time the measure has averaged under 95 in the election year, the incumbent has lost; over 95, he has won.

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