Last week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Full Employment Project published an important new paper—Monetary Rules and Targets: Finding the Best Path to Full Employment—by Haverford’s Carola Binder and Alex Rodrigue (B&R). The paper takes a close look at a critical aspect of how the Federal Reserve makes decisions about monetary policy: the… Read more
Archive for the ‘Federal Reserve’ Category
Uber hours, and some Labor Day housecleaning
Noam Scheiber has an interesting piece up at the NYT on choices made by Uber drivers as to how many hours they work (Scheiber’s stuff on the evolving workplace is must-read journalism, IMHO). Apparently, some drivers work more when fares are low and less when they’re high (Uber boosts fares in periods of high demand)…. Read more
Will the funds rate have time to get back to “normal” (wherever that is) before the next recession?
I’ve got a piece up at WaPo riffing off of this new paper by Fed economist David Reifschneider (DR). I wanted to add an interesting figure here that I couldn’t jam in the WaPo post. Some of the data in the figure comes from DR’s table 1 showing the number of basis points (hundredths of a percent, so… Read more
What if the Fed is just really good with anchors?
I’ve got a piece over at WaPo that OTE’ers might enjoy on the Fed’s 5, 3, 2 problem. As in their unemployment and interest rate targets (~5 and 3 percent) are too high and their inflation target (2 percent) is too low. Let’s talk about this last bit—the inflation target—a bit more, though this conversation… Read more
It’s all connected…4 referrals from today’s papers.
Three articles, one blog post. First, Dean Baker points to this great Bloomberg article by former Fed regional bank pres Narayana Kocherlakota (NK) on how, since black unemployment typical runs 2x the overall rate, Fed policy is especially consequential for them (and other minorities). It’s really just the old adage that when the economy sniffles, less… Read more