Saturday, February 18, 2012

gentle ben's license to intervene

that marks  a new qualitative stage in central bank activism

ben bought in all the markets he chose to buy
and bought deep..... if he so chose

his counter part in 1930 as pivot master
  of global credit flows
was good old crank monte norman
who lacked both the balls and the clout

ben does indeed look like an improvement over monte

---------------

but here's chrissy
"we learned from the Temin and Wigmore paper ... one way out of a recession
at the zero lower bound is by changing expectations"

"a regime change ...a new day "

as in ?

".. targeting a path for nominal GDP. If the Fed adopted such a nominal GDP target, they would start in some normal year before the crisis and say nominal GDP should have grown at a steady rate since then. Compared with that baseline, nominal GDP is dramatically lower today. Pledging to get back to the pre-crisis path for nominal GDP would commit the Fed to much more aggressive policy – perhaps more quantitative easing and deliberate actions to talk down the dollar. Such a strong change in the policy framework could have a dramatic effect on expectations, and hence on the behavior of consumers and businesses."


  expectations management
my my