Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, has said that the current uptick in inflation is temporary, and he expects inflation to subside in 2022. Despite rising inflation, the Fed is not in an inflation-fighting mood. Powell’s view rests heavily on interruptions in the supply chain that have...
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Part 1 of 3 One of the most frustrating things in debate is when you decisively win the initial point of contention, only to have your opponent “move the goalpost” to a different claim. To be sure, this is a human failing, not unique to any particular political perspective. I’m sure I myself do...
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Many economists and other analysts have recognized that the recovery from the U.S. economy’s most recent contraction has been unusually weak—weaker, for example, than any other since World War II. But analysts have disagreed in characterizing the current recovery, which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of business-cycle chronology,...
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As more and more people have taken an interest in monetary affairs—especially in the Fed and its various operations—in recent years, many people have joined the discussions related to these matters, especially on the World Wide Web. In reading these posts over the years, in particular in reading the comments on a post I placed...
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Regime uncertainty has gained increasing recognition as the current economic troubles have persisted with little or no improvement since the economy reached a cyclical trough early in 2009. As described in my 1997 paper, regime uncertainty pertains to the likelihood that investors’ private property rights in their capital and the income it yields will be...
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I pose this question seriously, not as a physiologist, but as an economic historian. I am provoked to raise the question by an advertisement that Amazon sent me recently, calling my attention a book titled Can Capitalism Survive? Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy. Seeing this sales pitch, my immediate reaction...
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The Federal Reserve last week announced that it had raised the discount rate – the interest rate at which member banks, which now includes GMAC and other formerly non-bank financial institutions, can borrow from the Fed – by 25 basis points, from one-half of one percent to three-quarters of one. It is no wonder...
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