Fighting the Fed

The Fed Under Fire

The Fed s Communication Breakdown

The Fed s Dollar Distraction

The Chinese Economy and Fed Policy

The Fed in Denial

Audit the Fed?

Blaming the Fed

The Fed vs. the Financiers

The Federal Reserve will not willingly resort to inflation.

Will Fed Tightening Choke Emerging Markets?

The Fed was hardly alone.

With dollar financing by the Federal Reserve available to large institutions, the Fed became the equivalent of a world central bank.

In the US, this has complicated the Federal Reserve s task.

Why the Fed Buried Monetarism

The Trapdoors at the Fed s Exit

The Fed pays the banks 0.25 to keep them idle.

But now commercial banks are willing to hold their excess reserves at the Fed, because the Fed now pays interest on those deposits.

Nor is the Fed specifically aiming to lower the dollar s value.

How the Fed Just Reduced Inequality

Once again, the US Federal Reserve is in the eye of the storm.

Today, the Fed is again playing the expectations game.

The US Federal Reserve is finally shifting its thinking.

That is why the Fed has been taking steps to become more transparent it releases the minutes of Federal Open Market Committee meetings and publishes transcripts with appropriate delay, while FOMC members give speeches detailing their views. Moreover, in a recent innovation, the Fed now publishes the inflation and interest rate forecasts of FOMC members and Reserve Bank presidents.

Where the Bank of Japan has now led, the Fed should follow.

The Fed is seeking to oblige foreign banks to create a holding company to own their separately capitalized subsidiaries, effectively giving the Fed direct oversight of their business.

The link between Fed bond purchases and the subsequent growth of the money stock changed after 2008, because the Fed began to pay interest on excess reserves.

But when the Federal Reserve allowed Lehman Brothers to fail in September of 2008, there was widespread panic, leading the Fed to intervene to prevent the collapse of every other major player.

The US Constitution, after all, does not guarantee the Fed s independence.

Even worse, the Fed is playing with fire.

That, in a nutshell, is what the Fed and the ECB are saying.

That, of course, is what the Fed had been hoping for.

Second, the Fed s actions do not seem to be effective.

The Fed declined to regulate these dubious practices.

The Fed should relearn that lesson.

The Fed has printed new bank reserves with reckless abandon.

The founding governors of the Federal Reserve System interpreted their mandate narrowly, viewing the Fed as responsible for maintaining gold convertibility and a stable dollar.

True, the US Federal Reserve has tried to prevent a recession by cutting its interest rates. But the Fed cannot endow the banks with new equity capital and prevent a credit crunch.

But the Fed s policy gambit has taken the US down the wrong road.

Hoenig and Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, have been leading the charge on this issue within the Federal Reserve System.

Moreover, many major central banks are implementing variants of QE alongside the Fed, dampening the effect of the Fed s actions on the dollar s value.

As a result, whenever the Fed cuts interest rates, it puts pressure on the whole dollar bloc to follow suit, lest their currencies appreciate as investors seek higher yields.

The Fed chairman s comments come at a critical and sensitive moment.

Then there is the question of the Fed s assisted growth model.

The Fed will clarify the direction of US monetary policy.