permanent zero

Raghuram Rajan, one of the few mainstream economists to warn of the US housing bubble, has recently written a piece which is highly critical of US monetary policy. His view, one that I share, is that US policy favours debtors over savers in…

You normally don't see these two phrases in a single headline, but they are very much connecting. I thought of this this morning when I read a post called Retirement in the Liquidity Trap by Tim Duy. Commenting on a Wall Street Journal…

This is from the blog Political Irony (hat tip UMKC). Higher consumer price inflation than we see now will probably result in demand destruction and recession before the Fed reacts. The slack in the economy would mean this becomes a…

The real question is whether the inflation that bondholders are expecting will actually lead to rate rises. Bond vigilantes can sell Treasuries in expectation of future rate hikes. (Remember, long rates are simply a chain of expected…

By Edward Harrison American politicians and citizens alike have no clear vision of the costs of a seemingly perpetual trillion-dollar annual deficit. Policy stimulus is focused on maintaining current consumption as opposed to making…

Byron Wien had a stellar record in 2009, accurately predicting the effect of a rather robust second half recovery across a broad range of markets. However, Byron Wien's Ten Surprises for 2010 were well off the mark. Before we review I will…

Dan Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, thinks that banks are under-reserving and that this will come back to haunt them when house prices fall in "the final leg down" of the housing crisis.  That is the right view…

In the fall of 2008, when the government took extreme steps to avoid a financial collapse, it created, what might be described as a partial liquidity trap. At the time, this was not a problem. The policymakers were not trying to assist…

All eyes are on the Fed today because markets across the globe in bonds, equities, commodities and forex want to know how much quantitative easing (QE) the Federal Reserve will do and what assets they will buy. As US short-term interest…

I was on BBC Radio Five Live at about 4AM local time this morning for a good 5 to 10 minutes, talking about the coalition government's austerity budget. My basic message was that austerity-lite might be defensible but full austerity is…