Traditional monetary policy, as practiced in the decades up to 2007, faces a problem looking ahead. The shared areas in this figure show recessions. During a typical recession, the Federal Reserve cut its policy target interest rates--the so-called federal funds rate--by about 5 percentage points.
The latest measures adopted by the Central Bank and the government of Argentina have stopped the collapse of the peso. However, without structural reforms on the spending side, we may find ourselves with a period of calm before a new storm.
One of my pet peeves about arguments over the role of money in elections is that the discussion usually focuses so heavily on campaign contributions, while leaving out other intersections of money in politics--like the role of lobbying.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that arguing about the definitions of terms like "capitalism" and "socialism" is a waste of time. So rather than argue, I will simply assert that the world has many flavors of capitalism: among them, US/British, Japanese, Scandinavian/northern European, German, Spanish/French/Italian southern European, and doubtless others. Within the United States, one might further identify a spectrum of capitalist beliefs.
The Fall 2017 issue of the Cato Journal includes 11 accessible papers on "The Economics of Immigration." Here, I'll mention some insights that especially caught my eye from two of the papers.
Many people have visceral but opposite reactions to the word "regulation." Some have an immediately positive reaction to almost any mention of regulation, in a belief that it is likely to be necessary corrective. Others have an immediately negative reaction, in the belief that it is likely to be a wasteful and perhaps even harmful overreaction. Me, I'm just a wishy-washy guy who thinks that some regulations can be useful, while others are misguided. On the off chance that there are a few more like me out there, how should we be reacting to the Trump administration's deregulation agenda?
We have been reading numerous comments recently about a forthcoming recession and the next crisis, particularly on the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The question is not whether there will be a crisis, but when. In the past fifty years, we have seen more than eight global crises and many more local ones, so the likelihood of another one is quite high. Not just because of the years passed since the 2007 crisis, but because the factors that drive a global crisis are all lining up.