asset-based economy

I have been off since Thursday due to the Easter holiday. But I want to write my traditional Friday post today with a grab bag of different issues I am seeing. I actually just want to focus on the US this time.

In the wake of the financial crisis, some US policy makers understood that the economics profession had erred in not taking debt aggregates and financial stability into account when conducting macroprudential regulation and making economic…

On Friday, I read a post on the New York City housing market that got me to thinking about how we view interest rates and their effect on credit markets. Traditionally, we view higher interest rates as a net tightening and slowing of the…

In the links today, I had a number of good posts that focused on the issue of fiscal policy versus monetary policy. There are a number of ways to look at the issue, economically and politically. However, I think the overriding takeaway…

Now that Europe is on the mend, the initial phase of the financial crisis is clearly in the rearview mirror. Equity prices, bonds prices and house prices have risen by leaps and bounds even before this economic recovery was clear. Yet, the…

The global economic recovery continues as all of the most important economies in the world are on track for growth. Europe is the laggard and the tepid recovery there could still stall out. Below are some brief ideas on where this is headed…

The macro debate today is about secular stagnation and the correct policy response to deal with it if it exists. With that backdrop, it is interesting to read Jeremy Grantham’s latest quarterly letter to investors, which sounds a word of…

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, policy makers’ aversion to fiscal policy is still large. So monetary policy rules the roost. With developed economies burdened by low growth, unemployment, and high levels of debt, monetary agents…

On Thursday, Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Charles Plosser gave a speech on Thursday called “A Limited Central Bank” that I highly recommend. The underlying theme of Plosser’s speech was that central banks should have a limited…

The latest data out of Europe shows the economy in the euro zone continuing to expand and suggests that we are probably in a technical recovery. In Europe, however, the threat to recovery is to the downside, whereas in the U.S. the main…