Yesterday, the Treasury announced that it will borrow $200 billion from the Federal Reserve and leave the cash on deposit with the Fed. As it initially goes on the Fed’s balance sheet the transaction is a wash.The Treasury...
Read MoreThe Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. presented us with the new list of problem banks. As of December 31, 2009, there were 702 commercial banks on the problem list of the FDIC. At the end of the third quarter of last year, the...
Read MoreThere were quite a few articles in the newspapers this morning concerning inflation and how governments should set their policy targets with respect to inflation. This discussion was set off by a paper written by Oliver...
Read MoreThe Federal Reserve, of course, garnered a lot of press headlines today because of the announcement made yesterday that it is raising the discount rate on primary credit from 50 basis points to 75 basis points. This action will...
Read MoreThe stories continue to come in that the recovery is proceeding. Just looking at the morning papers gives one a feeling that things are on the mend. Note these three stories that appeared in the Wall Street Journal today....
Read MoreOver the past sixteen months or so, since September 2008, people and businesses have moved a great deal of their wealth into very short-term assets. This continued into January 2010, but the pace has tapered off. In September...
Read MoreAccording to the latest statistics of the Federal Reserve on the banking system, the banking system, as a whole, continues to shrink. Over the last 12 months, the total assets of all commercial banks in the United States banking...
Read MoreFunny time to be talking about inflation, but the top economist at the International Monetary Fund brought it up.Oliver Blanchard, now serving at the IMF while on leave from MIT, has co-authored a new paper and has publically...
Read MoreA set of findings that will be released today by the Congressional Oversight Panel which oversees the TARP effort highlights exactly the problem I have been focusing on for the past year. The problem is the health of small- and...
Read MoreThe Internet, print journalism, and the broadcast media contain story after story about the debt problems in the world. A wider audience just learned this week a new acronym: PIGS, or PIIGS if you will. This, we all know now,...
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