Word: bankes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Back in September, V.V. Chari, an economist at the University of Minnesota and an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, got a call from a Congressman. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were arguing that they needed $700 billion to save the nation's financial system, and the Congressman wanted to know what to make of it all. Chari said he didn't know - he hadn't looked at the data. Policymakers kept talking about how banks weren't lending to businesses or to individuals or even to each other, so Chari pulled numbers...
...during all of that, there was also persistent anecdotal evidence that lending to credit-worthy borrowers was doing just fine - it seemed every other day some community bank CEO was on CNBC talking about how many loans his institution was making to small businesses and people who wanted to buy cars or houses. As the story of Chari, his surprise realization, and the academic dialogue that followed make clear, understanding what is happening in the economy - let alone how to fix it - is an incredibly difficult task, even for people who have built their entire careers around doing just that...
Borrowing heavily from features of the failed House and Senate plans, the Treasury plan requires that labor costs be on par with those of the nonunionized automakers but gives the companies until the end of 2009. It eliminates the job bank and requires that half of the future payments to the retiree health-care trust, VEBA, be made with stock. Further, it requires that debt be cut by two-thirds through a debt-for-equity exchange. Though these are terms of the loan, they are described as "targets," meaning exceptions can be made if there is deemed...
With the exchange rate hovering just below 90 yen to the dollar, and having risen to 87 on Wednesday after the U.S. cut interest rates, the Bank of Japan decided on Friday to cut its benchmark rate to 0.1%. The move was done on a near unanimous vote among policy makers. However, with its overnight rate already at 0.3%, it is unclear what such a small rate cut could achieve...
...appreciation of the yen slashes Japan's GDP growth rate by 0.3% to 0.4% points, says Masafumi Yamamoto, head of foreign exchange strategy for Japan at Royal Bank of Scotland. "Yen appreciation is also causing the Nikkei [stock index] plunge," he says. And that's affecting the confidence of Japan's businesses. On Monday, figures of the Bank of Japan's tankan survey, a quarterly survey of business sentiment in Japan, fell to a seven-year low. The tankan figure showed the steepest quarter over quarter decline in 34 years. The economy is expected to decline 0.8% for the fiscal...