Word: economists
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Christopher Foote, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, who studied negative equity in Massachusetts during the late 1980s and early 1990s when home prices dropped 23%, argues that most walk-aways are likely driven by the combination of two things: both negative equity and an economic hardship, such as job loss. (See 10 ways your job will change...
...attack as a prelude to a nightmare in global energy markets: Iran retaliating by sinking oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, blocking the route by which most Persian Gulf oil travels to world markets. "We will be in deep, deep trouble," says Leo Drollas, deputy director and chief economist of the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. "The market will go berserk...
...advocated "crude measures" like the old ban on interstate banking. Lately, though, I've been hearing similar suggestions from those of a conservative, University of Chicago bent. "When you give a lot of discretion to regulators, they don't use the tools that are given to them," Chicago economist Gary Becker said at a conference this spring. His prescription: rules, not leeway...
...rates, the Fed should just automatically increase the money supply 3% to 4% a year. Measuring the money supply in an era of financial innovation has turned out to be awfully hard, so in recent years believers in an automated Fed have turned to an equation concocted by Stanford economist John Taylor that takes in inflation, current economic growth and long-term-trend growth and churns out a suggested Fed interest-rate target. Taylor and some other conservatives have said that if the Fed had followed his rule in the early 2000s, all would be well today. There...
Then there's the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from other financial endeavors. By the time Congress repealed the law in 1999, it seemed utterly out of step with the times, but now many economists are wondering if there is something to the idea of separating risky financial activities from essential ones. Or we could tax financial transactions, a policy suggested as far back as 1929 by Virginia Senator Carter Glass (he of the Glass-Steagall Act) and now identified most closely with the late Yale economist James Tobin. In the 1970s, Tobin proposed...