Japan still teaching the world
On top of this, the effectiveness of monetary policy appears exhausted as zero interest rates and bouts of quantitative easing bring on all the visible results of vigorous pushing on a wet noodle, to choose a phrase deliberately. All the while, interest groups hold hostage any government that threatens to reduce their benefits, no matter what the cost to the broader society.
She left and everything golden went with her.
The only thing you have to look at is Treasury yields. As the market became more and more convinced that QE2 would happen, long yields rose and short yields dropped. In short, the reverse of what the Fed thinks it is doing.
ReplyDeleteThe benefit of being on the East Coast is that if you turn everything off, in the distance you can hear Krugman screaming.
PS: I very much enjoyed your coverage and the commentary by Fatboy.
ReplyDeleteIt occurs to me that our current preference for models over experiment and data is controlling many unsuccessful policy choices.
But then, alchemy never did turn lead into gold. This must say something about human beings.
Culturally we are backing off from scientific method and substituting wishful thinking and fantasy, and this is happening even in science.
I do not see the controlling duality of our times as conservative/liberal, but rather pragmatic/fantasizing.
Stag,
ReplyDeleteI'm really bummed.
We almost had a Robert RubinCON crossing today - 1198 on the S&P! Bernanke really let us down. A bigger QE2 announcement and we definitely would have crossed the 1200 point of many returns threshold.
There's always tomorrow.
MaxedOutMama,
ReplyDeleteCulturally we are backing off from scientific method and substituting wishful thinking and fantasy, and this is happening even in science.
I am once again reminded of H.P. Lovecraft.
It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however, soon shewed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them. - H.P. Lovecraft
mab,
ReplyDeleteBernanke might have got more bang for the buck if he had mentioned Lovecraft was his inspiration.
There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name -- cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation; terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion; shafts with odd bulbous enlargements; broken columns in curious groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. - H.P. Lovecraft