SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | According to San Francisco Fed president John Williams (and he´s far from being a lone voice) it seems “financial stability” is right up there together with inflation and unemployment.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes| The St Louis Fed Regional Economist has an interesting article: The Ups and Downs of Inflation and the Role of Fed Credibility. Although they likely don´t realize it, it reads like “last rites” to the present system.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | For the last four years many have touted increasing the inflation target to 4% as the best way to “cure” our ills. If I well recall, it started with the IMF, at least by its Chief-Economist Olivier Blanchard, who in an IMF publication wrote “Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy.”
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | There is a significant difference between the discourse formulated by Ms. Yellen and the one formulated by Feldstein. While the first talks about a “suffering economy,” the second insists on being preoccupied about the future of inflation.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | The WSJ has a piece which closely reflects the consensus view on the matter: “Japan´s Sales-Tax Boost will Test Abenomics”: The tax increase is designed to pay for Japan’s ballooning social-welfare costs and to pare its huge public debt, which, at more than twice the size of the economy, is the largest among rich nations.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | In “Mind the (spending) gap,” Atif Mian and Amir Sufi of Princeton and Chicago, respectively, are on the right track but go about it the wrong way and so arrive at a wrong conclusion. They wonder: We all know that households cut back on spending dramatically during the Great Recession. Are they spending now? Has spending caught up to the trend the United States was on before?
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | That’s the image that came to mind when I saw this chart from Bank Paribas that Binyamin Appelbaum reproduced in his post [see above].
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | David Andolfatto has an interesting take: “The question is this: Would you expect the labor market in the U.S. border states to look more like the Canadian labor market or more like the U.S. labor market?”
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | That’s plainly absurd. But maybe it’s what you should expect if the Fed narrows down its focus of analysis to a “corner of the room (inflation) which has already been ‘cleaned-out’”.
SAO PAULO | Guest post by Benjamin Cole at Historinhas | No serious democrat contends that obscurantism, opacity and secrecy are handmaidens of good government. Indeed, closed doors are properly and universally regarded as cardinal sins, while transparency and accountability as gateways to working democracies. Yet the public is barred from meetings of the most powerful economic policymaking body in the United States—the Federal Open Market Committee, the decision-making body of the Federal Reserve Board, wherein monetary policy is decided.