Word: feds
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...nonetheless making a big deal out of the Fed chairman's words? Partly because he's powerful. Bernanke's opinions on the economy's future shape the U.S. government's decisions about interest rates, bailout efforts and the like. Right now the main monetary-policy debate is between those who think the recovery will be weak and fitful--and thus the Fed should keep doing what it can to stimulate the economy--and those who think it will be rip-roaring enough that further spending would spark inflation. At Brookings, Bernanke seemed to indicate that he stood with the first...
...reaction to his statement feels more ritualistic than rational. After all, unemployment is still nudging 10%, and foreclosure rates remain high. Yet the Great Fed Shaman has pronounced the recession monster dead. Let us rejoice...
...Federal Reserve didn't think letting Lehman go bankrupt would be a disaster. Those same officials have since argued that the law gave them no choice. But it's also clear that the authorities--then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, in particular--didn't want to intervene. The Fed and Treasury had taken a lot of flak for their earlier bailouts of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was time to let the market work...
That brings us to lesson No. 2. Early in the Great Depression, powerful voices at Treasury and the Fed argued that financial crisis was a necessary corrective. "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised President Herbert Hoover. "It will purge the rottenness out of the system." This time around, after Lehman went under, no one at Treasury or the Fed talked that way. Instead, policymakers in the U.S. and overseas agreed that the panic had to be stopped at any cost. And it was, through a bailout that placed trillions of taxpayer...
...securities regulation, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and segregating commercial banks from Wall Street. It's not obvious that we need such a drastic overhaul now, but the contrast with the 1930s is stark. Ironic, too. By leaving financial markets alone, Mellon and his kindred spirits at the Fed ushered in an economic collapse that led to permanent government intervention in the financial sector. By intervening, Paulson and his kindred spirits at the Fed seem to have headed off a re-enactment of the New Deal...