Word: feds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Barack Obama's appointment of Berkeley professor Christina D. Romer as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors is consistent with this orientation, as she is an expert on the Great Depression and may lend support to the unwarranted focus on the Depression. Indeed, Romer has supported the Fed's current monetary policy because she sees parallels with earlier financial panics. (See who's in President-elect Obama's White House...
...While U.S. automobile companies have some responsibility for their current predicament, for many of the reasons you cite, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve have unclean hands as well. Each of the car companies had adequate capital entering the fall, but when Treasury and the Fed "brought down the house" by letting Lehman Brothers fail, worldwide credit markets froze, preventing Americans from buying cars. Financial markets and the lack of available consumer credit - not a lack of appealing car designs - are the reasons for this crisis, and piling the blame on Detroit is simply not balanced. Steven M. Friedman...
...about the same time as the Boston Fed piece came out, two finance professors at Harvard Business School, David Scharfstein and Victoria Ivashina, wrote a paper called "Bank Lending During the Financial Crisis of 2008." Scharfstein and Ivashina focused in on a database of new loans made to large corporations and documented a 36% drop during August-October 2008, as compared with the three months prior. They, too, argued that drawn-downs were artificially inflating overall lending figures. Yes, there was lending, but it was involuntary, and often to struggling companies - like GM and Tribune - that banks might not otherwise...
...share that information," he says. "They've been remarkably unforthcoming about the rationale for their interventions." That seems to be a common sentiment. "The one thing they emphasize that we really agree with is they want policymakers to share more data that underlie their decisions," says the Boston Fed's Duygan-Bump. As a new Administration takes office and the process of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fix the economy continues, it will be as important as ever to question whether the policy responses we come up with are the right ones - to make sure not only that...
...rather, is the burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union." According to Max Blumenthal, who published a recent article on the topic, the trope's persistent popularity is fed by financial opportunism: "The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry in a shrinking economy, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media." O'Reilly himself has lent credence to this theory. "Every company in America should be on its knees thanking Jesus for being...