News
CNN Money | BIS to global central banks: Time to reduce stimulus
Global investors freaked out last week with just a hint from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that the U.S. could pull back on its stimulus program later this year.
Bloomberg | Fed Monetary Course Hard to Undo for Bernanke Successor: Economy
The Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has committed itself to a monetary strategy for this year and beyond that will be difficult to undo under a new chairman.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Daily Caller | A deflationary rate hike?
In the aftermath of Ben Bernanke’s announced timetable for ending Fed bond purchases, long-term interest rates have jumped up while stock prices have cratered down.
Fortune | A new era for the U.S. dollar
Against the world's major currencies, the value of the greenback has been strengthening on signs that the U.S. economy is improving -- a development that hasn't happened in recent years. Who knows what might transpire months from today, but some analysts and traders have taken the recent rally as a sign of the beginning of the end of the dollar's slump.
WSJ | Stopping Bank Crises Before They Start
In recent months the realization has sunk in across the country that the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation is a colossal mess. Yet we obviously can't go back to the status quo that produced a financial catastrophe in 2007-08. Fortunately, there is an alternative.
Washington Post | Cheap money can’t buy a strong economy
For more than four years, central banks around the world — led by the Federal Reserve — have aggressively pumped money into their economies to stimulate faster revival. These infusions are huge. From 2007 to today, the assets of major central banks nearly doubled from $10.4 trillion to $20.5 trillion, reports the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in its just-released annual report.
CATO | The Rise and Fall of the Gold Standard in the United States
There is, in informal discussions and even in some academic writings, a tendency to treat U.S. monetary history as divided between a gold standard past and a fiat dollar present. In truth, the legal meaning of a "standard" U.S. dollar has been contested, often hotly, throughout U.S. history, and a functioning (if not formally acknowledged) gold standard was in effect for less than a quarter of the full span of U.S. history.
Blogs
Economist | I'm a central banker, get me out of here
Central banks are unable to repair banks’ broken balance sheets, to put public finances back on a sustainable footing, to raise potential output through structural reform. What they can do is to buy time for those painful actions to be taken. But that time, provided through unprecedented programmes of monetary stimulus since the financial crisis of 2008, has been misspent.
