Disconnecting the Heart Monitor In my post last week titled, “Approaching the Zero Bound,” I characterized the Fed’s plan to buy hundreds of billions ($600 billion, it turns out) in U.S. debt as a “hypodermic needle to the economy’s heart.” Actually, that analogy is not quite complete. The Fed’s money-injection plan, also known as quantitative...Read More
Adding Back Checks & Balances If you haven’t been paying attention, there seems to be widespread consensus that much of the “recent unpleasantness” (what some people in the South called the Civil War) has to do with too few checks and balances in the financial system. So, one of the reasons that securitized mortgages became...Read More
