Ben Bernanke: Wall Street’s servant | Dean Baker
The Federal Reserve is failing in its duty to tackle unemployment – because its chairman heeds only the banks, not the US public
Last week, the Fed announced that it would use the proceeds from retired mortgage-backed securities to buy up more government bonds. This may have a very modest effect in keeping long-term interest rates [...]
US quantitative easing: the Federal Reserve’s options
The US Fed open markets committee meets tonight to address the slowdown in the world’s largest economy and QE is back on the agenda
What is QE?
The worst economic slump in decades prompted central banks around the world to take unprecedented measures. By the end of last year the Bank of England had pumped £200bn into [...]
It’s too soon for austerity, Ben Bernanke tells Congress
Federal Reserve chairman insists ‘we should maintain stimulus in the short term’, in contrast to approach taken by UK and eurozone countries
The head of America’s central bank, Ben Bernanke, warned against immediate European-style budget austerity today when he insisted that withdrawing fiscal stimulus was too risky for the recession-threatened US economy.
In a second day of [...]
California dreaming of school funds | Sasha Abramsky
The US cannot allow allow state and local education systems to implode through lack of cash. But will Congress intervene?
Last Wednesday, thousands of trade union members and concerned parents walked through downtown Sacramento to California’s state capitol building, joining six marchers on the last leg of their 365-mile, 48-day, protest walk up California’s Central Valley [...]
China to do something. Or not | Richard Adams
It’s simple: China is soon going to revalue its currency against the US dollar. Or it isn’t. It just depends who you ask
Both these articles were published on Saturday. Which is right? Take your pick:
New York Times, 6 March 2010China’s central bank governor indicated Saturday that the government was unlikely to detach the value of [...]
Gold hits record high
• Falling dollar pushes up gold price• Sterling and oil also rise
Gold has hit a fresh all-time high this morning, as the weakening US dollar prompted investors to increase their bullion holdings.
The dollar came under pressure after Friday’s worse-than-expected US jobless data and the G20 meeting at the weekend reinforced expectations that American interest rates [...]
Embrace the dollar’s downfall | Dean Baker
Banks might suffer if China stopped buying US debt, but the US economy as a whole would be much better off
Most of the economists and pundits who could not see an $8tn housing bubble are telling us that the United States desperately needs the Chinese government to keep buying its debt. This crew of failed [...]
The IMF’s misguided new mission | Mark Weisbrot
The IMF wants to expand its role in the global economy and be the world’s lender of last resort. We shouldn’t give it more power
Rescued from a state of near-irrelevance by the world recession and an infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars (mostly from the US, Europe and Japan), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [...]
