Economics Questions

Re: Question regarding a article I read.

DD5 — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:43:26 GMT

scrosley:

In a monthly survey of mainly Wall Street and other business economists, 42 said low interest rates were partly to blame for the housing boom while 12 sided with Mr. Bernanke and said they weren't. Academic economists who specialize in monetary policy were split in a separate survey: 13 said low interest rates helped cause the housing bubble; 14 said they didn't.

These so called economists have no clue. Including the 42 who said interest rates were partly to blame.

The reason is simple. They lack the tools necessary to understand how and why the capital markets behave in such a way.

They are not familiar with Austrian Capital Theory or any other theory that incorporates the intertemporal sequential process of the production structure. Their world is mostly static and completely timeless.

They treat capital as some mystical homogeneous thing that you don't have to worry about.

Their monetary theory is fallacious in that it assumes money to be neutral and changes in quantity to affect all market actors instantaneously, allowing them to resort to pseudo-scientifically and mathematically erroneous equations such as the equation of exchange MV=PT, which conveniently ignores all of the micro-economic effects of inflation.

Re: Question regarding a article I read.

mouser98 — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:09:08 GMT

Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc., included it on a long list of culprits: "Low interest rates, financial innovations in mortgages, lax regulation, and speculative euphoria."

what an idiot. none of them see the obvious. as long as the big financial institutions believe they can rely on the US taxpayer to take the beating for their bad gambles, no amount of "regulation" will curb their "speculative euphoria"

and they know they can rely on the US taxpayer. Barney Frank just got a bill through the House promising the banksters another $4trillion of monopoly money if or when they need it.

or maybe they do all see this and its just taboo to say it.

anyways I imagine Kenneth Kuttner defines "bubble" as a rapid expansion of a sector of the market. that can happen without loose monetary policy, for example, look at the expansion of the home computer market in the '80's... its just that loose monetary policy overinflates the bubbles and makes their bursting that much worse.

Re: Question regarding a article I read.

hugolp — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:15:35 GMT

scrosley:
Check out the last paragraph, about lots of bubbles being created without loose monetary policy. Has there been many since the FED took over in 1913? If so how were they "made"? And has there been times of long periods of loose monetary policy with no sort of bubbles?

There were three central banks in the USA before the Fed. They were all closed down. The first one only lasted a year, the second one was closed by Jefferson and the third one was closed by Jackson. You could say that the history of the USA is the history of the people against the desire of the bankers to create a central bank.

I would like to see an example of this bubbles being created without loose monetary policies, because I am sure they can not point to one.

Re: Question regarding a article I read.

Esuric — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:59:53 GMT

scrosley:
Check out the last paragraph, about lots of bubbles being created without loose monetary policy. Has there been many since the FED took over in 1913?

Recessions since the FED: 20, 29, 33, 37, 45, 48, 53, 57, 60, 69, 73, 80, 81, 90, 01, 07.

10 of these are the worst recessions in U.S history. The FED's track record is as bad as it gets.

scrosley:
And has there been times of long periods of loose monetary policy with no sort of bubbles?

No. Loose monetary policy inflates bubbles which pop and cause recessions.

Question regarding a article I read.

scrosley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:50:40 GMT

Check out the last paragraph, about lots of bubbles being created without loose monetary policy. Has there been many since the FED took over in 1913? If so how were they "made"? And has there been times of long periods of loose monetary policy with no sort of bubbles?

By JON HILSENRATH

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says low interest rates engineered by the Fed in the early 2000s aren't to blame for the housing boom and bust. But he hasn't convinced fellow economists.

Two surveys conducted by The Wall Street Journal this week found many economists believe low rates did contribute to the bubble.

In a monthly survey of mainly Wall Street and other business economists, 42 said low interest rates were partly to blame for the housing boom while 12 sided with Mr. Bernanke and said they weren't. Academic economists who specialize in monetary policy were split in a separate survey: 13 said low interest rates helped cause the housing bubble; 14 said they didn't.

It is more than an academic argument. Fed officials have been trying to understand what went wrong last decade to avoid repeating it. In addition, lawmakers are weighing whether to give Mr. Bernanke a second term and whether to bolster or restrain the Fed's power as a financial regulator.

The Fed pushed its benchmark federal funds interest rate -- at which banks lend to each other overnight -- to 1% in 2003 when Alan Greenspan was Fed chairman and Mr. Bernanke was a member of the Fed board. With the economy weak and deflation a concern, the Fed pushed rates up gradually beginning in 2004. Mr. Bernanke became chairman in 2006.

Retired Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, right, talks with Ben Bernanke after Mr. Bernanke was sworn in as chairman in 2006. The federal-funds rate fell to 1% under Mr. Greenspan in 2003.

Mr. Bernanke laid out his defense of Fed policy in a speech to the American Economic Association last week, acknowledging that interest rates were very low but adding that policy "does not appear to have been inappropriate." Other factors -- notably an explosion of exotic mortgages and a flood of cash coming into the U.S. from abroad -- were the crucial drivers of the housing bubble, he said. "Regulatory and supervisory policies, rather than monetary policies, would have been more effective means of addressing the run-up inhouse prices," he saiThe "basic problem" was "the mistake" of raising short-term interest rates too slowly from 2004 through 2006, said Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan. "Going up quicker would have been better."

"The appreciation of house prices was but one of many indicators which called for a somewhat more restrictive interest-rate policy" in 2004 and 2005, said Marvin Goodfriend of Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. He was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va., during much of that time.

Many economists met Mr. Bernanke halfway -- arguing that low rates played a role in fueling the housing boom, though they may not have been the key force. Some noted that low rates encouraged banks to write the riskier loans that Mr. Bernanke puts at the center of the crisis.

"There is plenty of blame to go all around," said Martin Eichenbaum of Northwestern University, expressing a commonly expressed view. "Loose monetary policy certainly contributed to easy financing, which was one element of the bubble."

The WSJ surveyed economists who are part of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Monetary Policy Program and asked them whether low interest rates caused the housing bubble. Read a sampling of their responses

In both surveys, The Wall Street Journal asked economists whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement used by Mr. Bernanke in his speech to describe the position of Fed critics: "Excessively easy monetary policy by the Federal Reserve in the first part of the decade helped cause a bubble in house prices in the United States, a bubble whose inevitable collapse proved a major source of the financial and economic stresses of the past two years."

Most of the economists in the Wall Street forecasters' survey, which polls Wall Street, corporate and a few academic economists monthly, agreed with the statement. Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc., included it on a long list of culprits: "Low interest rates, financial innovations in mortgages, lax regulation, and speculative euphoria."

The Wall Street Journal separately sent emails to 68 members of the National Bureau of Economic Research's monetary economics program, a group Mr. Bernanke led from 2000 through 2002. Twenty-seven of them responded. (Seven members of the group are in public office and weren't included in the survey.)

Many academics who responded were sympathetic to Mr. Bernanke.

"The 'bubble' didn't really get going until 2005-2006, by which time the Fed had raised rates to more or less normal levels," said Kenneth Kuttner of Williams College. "Second, there are lots of instances in which bubbles occurred in the absence of loose monetary policy, and instances in which policy was loose and there was no bubble."