Why are banks no longer lending to each other? Are they afraid that collapse is imminent somewhere in the system, as with the Lehman collapse in 2008?
The problem is not a structural lack of liquidity but the use banks make of the liquidity available to them [...] they use the liquidity placed at their disposal to buy up massive amounts of debt which sooner or later will lead to a major new crisis
Warning: What you are about to read is not about Russia, the 2016 election, or the latest person to depart from the White House in a storm of tweets. It’s the Beltway story hiding in plain sight with trillions of dollars in play and an economy to commandeer.
Thoughts that huge tax cuts to high-income households will offset a downturn in automobile sales, cuts in public spending, rising college tuition or a dismantling of the health sector are irrational. If theFed raises interests rates, it will threaten a more fragile economy than appears at the moment. The drive to be “normal” in a world that is clearly not normal, may put us in danger of a downturn that will be difficult to recover from.
The Federal Reserve's newest bank president, a Republican who served as a top Treasury Department official during the financial crisis, called for policy makers to consider breaking up big banks to prevent future government bailouts. His proposals also include: Turning large banks into public utilities; and taxing leverage throughout the financial system. Seven years after the crisis, it is now time to move forward and end TBTF.
When an economist confidently tells us that the unemployment rate can't get below 5.4 percent, 5.2 percent, or 5.0 percent without causing the inflation rate to spiral upward, why should anyone have confidence in this assessment?
The central bankers and the Ferguson residents would do well to switch places. Ferguson is actually a much better place from which to understand the consequences of the past six years of economic policies.
If high unemployment is one of the obstacles to more equitable growth, then the question is: how do we achieve full employment? There are four main ways. Each route faces substantial political opposition, both because of powerful interests that would be hurt by paying higher wages and because of popular prejudices that are persistently promoted in the media.
Central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates.
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