By Mike Konczal via The Next New Deal | There’s going to be a new Federal Reserve chair nominated in a few weeks. Last year, asking if the candidates supported the Evans Rule and QE3 would have helped us figure out if they took their role seriously. This year, the questions are more vague.
MADRID | By J.P. Marín Arrese | Christine Lagarde’s stern warning on potential problems ahead for emerging countries has been delivered in rather a blunt way: “even with the best of efforts the dam might leak”. At the annual Fed gathering in Wyoming she claimed “further lines of defence” were needed to address a financial crisis. The hike in interest rates following the prospect of a progressive tapering in asset purchases by the US, has induced a sharp reversal in fund flows between developed and emerging markets.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | Friedman was right to claim how easy it would have been to avoid the depression, given how easy it was to turn the economy around. Today, on the other hand, we are content with remaining ‘depressed’.
NEW YORK | By Ana Fuentes | Americans blame Bush more than Obama, who seems to be benefiting from the current economic stability. However, everything could change once the Fed stops injecting QE steroids.
MADRID | By Luis Arroyo | Monetary policies are a by-product of politics, after all, and in Europe, politics are tightly controlled from Berlin, which will probably use the Fed’s reaction as example of what the ECB must do.
It seems like the million-dollar question: what if the ECB stopped sitting on its hands, change its monetary policy and pump some cash into the suffering euro peripheral countries? George Mason University Economics professor Tyler Cowen wonders about the consequences in his blog Marginal Revolution.
BARCELONA | By CaixaBank research | Compared with its pre-crisis size, the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve in the US has tripled while the European Central Bank’s has only doubled.
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | The US economy is on its way up to the growth heaven while others, like Europe, live under the knife. Broad money or M3 volumes have increased in the US by 10pc. In terms of what it is strictly required, the Federal Reserve is fulfilling its duties. The broad money supply includes factors of money supply and money and credit demand, which means that there is activity in all money and financial markets. The…
Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, was talking on Tuesday in Berlin about the obvious economic challenges in 2012, and a possible policy path for global cooperation to restore confidence and growth. Readers from around the peripheral European Monetary Union zone have convinced The Corner that Ms Lagarde’s words have achieved quite an echo among member states currently undergoing net austerity pressures. These are some of the most celebrated…
