Daily Archives: September 13, 2012

Shamanistic Economics

By Dan Kervick

The Fed did something on Wednesday: it announced a new program of open-ended quantitative easing, and it announced that it likely won’t pull back on the new round of monthly asset purchases once the economy begins to recover more strongly, but will keep the purchases going for some indefinite period of time afterward.  After what exactly was left unsaid.  The Fed apparently has a target it intends to overshoot, but hasn’t said exactly what the target is.  But whatever it is, we have been given forward guidance that the reaching of that unspecified target won’t stop the asset purchases – at least not right away.

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How to End the Crisis

By Marriner S. Eccles
(via e-mail from Thorvald Grung, Central Bank of Norway)

Marriner Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This note consists of excerpts from an address he gave to the US Senate’s Committee on Finance in 1933 before he was called to Washington for public service by FDR. The original address contained in the Congressional Records has been reduced from over thirty pages (including questions and answers) to only three pages here that contain his essential message. The address has been edited by Thorvald Grung Moe, Visiting Scholar at Levy Economics Institute. Some parts have been slightly modified to fit the current time and crisis. Additions or alteration to the text has been marked by square brackets. All original figures used by Eccles in the address have been inflated by a factor of 16.4 according to the official US CPI index.

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Has ‘Super Mario’ Really Saved the Euro?

By Marshall Auerback

Germany’s Constitutional Court gave a green light on Wednesday for the country to ratify Europe’s new bailout fund, boosting hopes that the single currency bloc is finally putting in place the tools to resolve its three-year old debt crisis.

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Beyond the Morality of Spending and Saving (Money) – Part 2

By Michael Hoexter

Ethics, Moral Advocacy and Economics (con’t)

If we look at the structure of the discourse produced by academic economists after Smith whether in print or in media appearances, moral frameworks provide a structuring role that often outweighs the technical aspect of the content which is presented.  Well-known among MMT-oriented and post-Keynesian economists are the arguments of austerity advocates, who ignore the analytically obvious monetary and economic consequences of austerity in pursuit of the seeming virtue of every economic actor becoming a “saver” of money.  Continue reading