Roubini Topic Archive: United States
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DEMYSTIFYING QUANTITATIVE EASING
It is “QE Week” at EconoMonitor and here’s my contribution. No, we aren’t celebrating either the Monarch or the ship. We’re talking about the Fed’s Quantitative Easing. I’m going to discuss the basics of QE and explain why it’s Much Ado about almost Nothing.
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Is Modern Banking Nothing But a Criminal Enterprise?
You’ve seen me comparing the modern financial system to Shrek’s Onion–under every layer you find fraud. If you’re among the 99%, you are the mark. Excellent piece by Prof Christopher Peterson. He argues: The famous thief, escape artist, and master of disguise, Willie Sutton, is rumored to have said that he robbed banks “because that’s [...]
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MORE QE, LIBOR, BOND VIGILANTES , SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENTS, AND INTEREST RATE DETERMINATION
The Fed’s meeting again, and many expect another round of Quantitative Easing. People talk about a Big Bazooka, but the Fed keeps shooting blanks. No matter what it does, it won’t matter much. There’s so much confusion about interest rate determination and effects of rates on the economy. Let me quickly discuss several seemingly unrelated [...]
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WHY WE’RE SCREWED
As the Global Financial Crisis rumbles along in its fifth year, we read the latest revelations of bankster fraud, the LIBOR scandal. This follows the muni bond fixing scam detailed a couple of weeks ago, as well as the J.P. Morgan trading fiasco and the Corzine-MF Global collapse and any number of other scandals in [...]
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Martin Wolf’s Liquidity Traps and Free Lunches Through Fiscal Expansion
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a critique of Chairman Bernanke’s understanding of money (here: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2012/04/19/does-chairman-bernanke-know-squat-about-money/). At the end of my blog, I summarized a good column written by Martin Wolf that did get money (mostly) right: http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2012/04/17/fiscal-and-monetary-policy-in-a-liquidity-trap/#ixzz1sRMJH300. Wolf promised a Part II on the topic of appropriate monetary and fiscal policy in a [...]
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DOES CHAIRMAN BERNANKE KNOW SQUAT ABOUT MONEY?
I think the biggest policy failures in Washington over the past three or four decades are caused by confusion over the nature of money, and more specifically, the nature of a sovereign currency. So many of our policy makers simply do not understand that a sovereign issuer of the currency is not like a household [...]
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Developing the ‘Financial Instability Hypothesis’: More on Hyman Minsky’s Approach
Since Paul Krugman kicked-off a heated discussion about Minsky’s views on banks, and because the annual “Minsky Conference” co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Levy Economics Institute starts this morning, I thought it would be useful to run a couple of posts laying-out what Minsky was all about. This first piece will detail his [...]
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KRUGMAN VERSUS MINSKY: Who Should You Bank On When It Comes to Banking?
Last week I explained why Minsky matters, outlining his main contributions. See here: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2012/03/27/why-minsky-matters-part-one/#idc-container This was, in part, a response to a blog by Paul Krugman that appeared to dismiss the importance of trying to find out “what Minsky really meant”. See here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/minksy-and-methodology-wonkish/ But, more importantly, it was a response to his defense of [...]
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WHY MINSKY MATTERS: Part One
My friend Steve Keen recently presented a “primer” on Hyman Minsky; you can read it here: http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2012/03/a-primer-on-minsky/ In his piece, Steve criticized the methodology used by Paul Krugman and argued that Krugman could learn a lot from Minsky. In particular Krugman’s equilibrium approach and primitive dynamics was contrasted to Minsky’s rich analysis. Finally, Krugman’s model of debt deflation [...]
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THE $7 TRILLION DOLLAR QUESTION THAT HAUNTS BANKS: When Will the Obama Administration Recognize that MERS Destroyed the Chain of Title Making All Foreclosures Suspect?
I’ve been writing about the MERS monster since 2010. Here is one of my early pieces: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/l-randall-wray/merss-smoking-gun-part-1-_b_794713.html I suppose it is now safe to reveal that a staffer of Representative Marcy Kaptur put me on the trail of this fraud—in dollar terms it has to be the single biggest fraud in human history. In sheer [...]
