Tag Archives: zero lower bound

The End of Zero Interest Rates?

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August 14, 2023 — What a difference a year makes!  In 2021, interest rates were close to zero in the US and the UK,  and slightly negative in the eurozone and Japan.  They were expected to remain low indefinitely.  Remarkably, as recently as January 2022, investors thought that the probability the interest rate would rise above 4.0 % within 5 years was only 12% in the US, 4 % for the euro-zone, and 7 % for the UK [p.45].  Those were short-term nominal interest rates.  Correcting for expected inflation, real interest rates were substantially negative and expected to remain so. read more

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Stan Fischer, the Fed, and Sub-par US Growth

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      Now that Janet Yellen is to be Chair of the US Federal Reserve Board, attention has turned to the candidate to succeed her as Vice Chair.  Stanley Fischer would be the perfect choice.   He has an ideal combination of all the desirable qualities, unique in the literal sense that nobody else has them.  During his academic career, Fischer was one of the most accomplished scholars of monetary economics.  Subsequently he served as Chief Economist of the World Bank, number two at the International Monetary Fund, and most recently Governor of the central bank of Israel.   He was a star performer in each of these positions.   I thought in 2000 he should have been made Managing Director of the IMF.   read more

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Monetary Alchemy, Fiscal Science

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          The year 2013 marks the 100th anniversaries of two separate major institutional innovations in American economic policy:  the Constitutional Amendment enacting the federal income tax, ratified on February 3, 1913, and the law establishing the Federal Reserve, passed in December 1913.  
           It took some time before the two new institutions became associated with the explicit concepts of fiscal policy and monetary policy, respectively.   It wasn’t until after the experience of the 1930s that they came to be viewed as potential instruments for managing the macro-economy.  John Maynard Keynes, of course, pointed out the advantages of expansionary fiscal policy in circumstances like the Great Depression.   Milton Friedman blamed the Depression on the Fed for allowing the money supply to fall.    [Tools of fiscal policy used by governments, in addition to tax rates and tax deductions, are spending and transfers.  Tools of monetary policy used by central banks include interest rates, quantities of money and credit, and instruments such as reserve requirements and foreign exchange intervention used in various (non-US) countries.] read more

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