Finance Basic To Advance Level Knowledge

My latest Macro Musings is with Gauti Eggertson . Gauti is a professor of economics at Brown University and formerly worked in the research departments of the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has written widely on liquidity traps, deflation, and the zero lower bound (ZLB) and joined me to talk about these issues. This was a fun conversation and a good look back at the challenges and shortcomings of macroeconomic policy since the crisis in 2008. One of the big takeaways from our conversation, at least for me, is that central banks during this time ignored many of the key findings in the literature when it comes to best practices at the ZLB. Before getting to these missed opportunities, it is worth recalling the nature of the ZLB problem. It emerges when there has been a severe recession that forces down the 'natural' or market-clearing level of short-term interest rates to a level well below 0%. The Fed's normal response,...

President Trump is worried about the strong dollar : In his interview with the Journal on Friday, Mr. Trump said the U.S. dollar was already “too strong” in part because China holds down its currency, the yuan. “Our companies can’t compete with them now because our currency is too strong. And it’s killing us.” The real issue is not China but the diverging of the current and expected paths of monetary policy among the major advanced economies, particularly the United States and Europe. The Fed has been tightening and is expected to continue do so with further rate hikes in 2017. The ECB, on the other hand, is still running its QE program and is keeping it short-term policy rates pegged close to zero.  This policy divergence can be seen in the figure below. It shows the 6-month interest rate, 6 months ahead for the United States minus the same measure for the Eurozone (blue line). 1 Ever since mid-2014 this spread has been rising--with a brief plateauing in 2016--and the tra...

My latest Macro Musing podcast is with Anat Admati. Anat is a professor of finance and economics at Stanford University. Since the crisis in 2008, she has also been a fervent advocate of banks using more equity and less debt to fund their investments. As part of this effort, Anat coauthored the book "Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do About it". She joined me to talk about these and other issues related to the stability of the U.S. banking system. It was a fun and interesting conversation throughout. We covered everything from the distortions created by the Basel bank regulations to the still inordinate amount of bank leverage to the prospects for a safer financial system. One of the more sobering implications of our discussion is that the U.S. banking system is not much safer today than it was in 2008. This is a point also made by Larry Summers in a recent Brookings Paper .  You can listen to the podcast on Soundcloud , iTunes ...

My latest Macro Musing podcast is with Allan Meltzer. Allan is a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a well-known monetarist and author of the authoritative multi-volume history of the Fed .  We had a wide-ranging conversation on everything from Allan's role in the Monetarist's Counterrevolution to his reinterpretation of Keyne's General Theory to his take on current Fed policies. Among other things, I learned that Allan formerly worked under Paul Volker in the Kennedy Administration.   This was a fun interview and Allan showed he still has a lot of spunk in him. The interview taped live in front of audience at the Southern Economic Association meetings last November.  You can listen to the podcast on Soundcloud , iTunes , or your favorite podcast app. You can also listen via the embedded player above. And remember to subscribe since more episodes are coming.

My latest Macro Musings podcast is with Ylan Muy of the Washington Post. She was the Fed beat reporter for several years and now covers economic policy at the White House. She joined me to discuss what it was like covering the Fed and what we might expect going forward from President Trump's economic policies. This was a fascinating conversation throughout and we covered everything from the tight security of FOMC press meetings to the future of the Fed's balance sheet to whether the Fed will ever have a truly symmetric 2% inflation target. We also considered whether Trump's economic policies will truly live up to the market's expectations for them. One thing we do know for sure is that 2017 will be an interesting year for U.S. economic policy and Ylan will have much to cover for the Washington Post. Ylan also shared that she is working with the Brookings Institute on a book about negative interest rates as a tool for monetary policy. It sounds interesting an...