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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...
From this anti-Depression policy has come a stream of costly policy errors that could ultimately prolong the current recession. The Fed's Dec. 16 decision to drop the target federal-funds rate to a record low of 0% to 0.25% is but the most recent of these. With rates already effectively trading near zero despite the Fed's previous target of 1%, the decision does not actually change rates and only sends a negative message about the state of the economy. That worsens confidence. And now the target rate has nowhere else to go, so the Fed will have...
...continuing to throw money at the banks, the government is on the road to prolonging the recession and effecting massive inflation once confidence is restored and the economy then has too much liquidity. By making money available to the banks essentially for free, the Fed does not guarantee that the banks will lend out the money to businesses. There is no motivation to lend money at low rates when capital preservation (i.e., lack of confidence) is still a leading issue. Rates may be low, but the banks are not going to offer these rates to the individuals and industries that...
...from being helpful, the Treasury worsened the situation by increasing the liquidity of the financial sector through its bailout. However, the greatly enhanced lending capacity of depository institutions has not yet reached the money supply, as evidenced by the tremendous level of excess reserves. When it does, the Fed will find it difficult indeed to summon the political will, or find the ability, to soak up all this excess liquidity. Recessions ordinarily lead to deflation or disinflation, which increase the real value of assets and act to end the recession by fostering spending. This natural and necessary corrective mechanism will...
...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...