Tag Archives: Ben Bernanke
The real reasons for low real rates
The lowest interest rates in history are failing to spur sustained recovery. Rather, low real rates mirror financial and structural weaknesses Economists cannot agree on the causes of these low real rates. They discuss various hypotheses. Central banks have held policy rates low for years – have these ultra low nominal rates reduced real rates,…
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Are investors right to pin their hopes on central banks?
Central banks disown any responsibility for stock markets; yet we all know they take market conditions into account. How will they respond if the turmoil resumes? Apparently the banks want central banks to get interest rates back to “normal”. Axel Weber, head of UBS, former head of the Bundesbank and former council member of the…
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Between Debt and the Devil: A Review
According to Adair Turner, Britain’s former chief financial regulator, the global financial crisis had one big cause: bad ideas. These are ideas that Turner disapproves of. The key proposition of his new book is simply stated: “banking systems left to themselves are bound to produce too much of the wrong sort of debt, instability and…
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‘The Money Trap’ now
The book argued that the crisis was the joint product of inflation targeting, irresponsible banking and a weak international monetary system. The book tried to show how these were inter-related: First, inflation targeting, which had been a valuable tool in combatting 1970s inflation, had by the 2000s outlived its usefulness as a guide and discipline for…
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Bernanke’s lost opportunity
Given that he was at the heart of monetary policy making before, during and after the biggest monetary disaster of all time, Ben Bernanke should be mightily pleased with the reviews he has been getting as he leaves office as Fed chairman. All but a disgruntled minority give him full marks for leading…
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The financial crisis was good for some
All the chest-beating about the financial crisis distracts attention from the fact that many parties gained from it. Governments – except for a few peripheral countries – obtained cheap financing. The US benefiited from a boost to international demand for the dollar, helping to put the euro in its place, just as a previous wave…
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IV The Power of Global Finance
Under present arrangements, finance too often acts as a malevolent force, rewarding private sectional interests at the expense of the public interest. This is because the globalisation of markets has run ahead of our power to control them. Properly harnessed, global finance could be, again, an enormously powerful force for good. Designing such a harness…
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The Fed at 100
The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law by President Wilson on December 23 1913. Its purposes were “To provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.”…
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Goodhart’s cry of despair
Five years after the international banking system fell into the arms of the central banks and governments, there is still a paralysing uncertainty about the extent and cost of regulation, the viability of banking models and the monetary policy regime. More about financial regulation and banking models in future columns. Now let us look…
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The governor stakes revisited
I have mentioned the familiar names – Tucker, Vickers, Turner, Burns. Of these Paul Tucker has the deepest grasp of the issues the new governor will confront, and he is getting encouragingly more radical on bank reform – like everybody else. Even Lord Turner has been asking questions about the whole viability of fractional…
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