Planet Money Book—a long-time listener, first-time reader’s review
Planet Money Book is an excellent introduction to economics and finance and reminded me why it is good to have Planet Money in our life.
Why hadn’t Federal Reserve rescued Lehman Brothers in 2008?
This week, the trio who was directly responsible for the decision to let Lehman fail – Bernanke, Tim Geithner (then New York Fed President), and Hank Paulson (then Treasury Secretary) – joined together at a panel held by Brookings Institution and spoke about the lessons they had learned from the crisis.
The sovereign-bank “doom loop”
Since the Euro crisis, investors and policymakers are well aware of the so-called "doom loop" between the banking system and the sovereign. That is, a crisis originating in the banking system (sovereign) will weaken the sovereign (banking system), which in turn will worsen the banking (sovereign) crisis itself.
In a recent ECB discussion Paper "Managing the sovereign-bank nexus", the 7 economists - Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Caio Ferreira, Nigel Jenkinson, Luc Laeven, Alberto Martin, Camelia Minoiu, and Alexander Popov - coauthored the paper suggested that the banks and sovereigns are linked by three interacting channels:
September FOMC Meeting: The Potential Dissenters
The Federal Reserve is expected to cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points this week. This has been the baseline market assumption since Chairman Jerome Powell's speech at Jackson Hole, in which he proclaimed, “the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance."
The question is, how many dissenting votes will Powell face in this meeting?
IMF Growth Projections and Overfitting in Judgment-based Economic Forecasts
In a recent IMF working paper "Overfitting in Judgment-based Economic Forecasts: The Case of IMF Growth Projections", economist Klaus-Peter Hellwig examined IMF's World Economic Forecasts (WEO) and check if the forecast model suffer from the problem of overfitting.
How to make US inflation chart by pulling data from BLS API with Python
An important question is how do we get the series IDs for the data you need. The short answer is through BLS's Data Finder
Should Federal Reserve use scenario analysis to handle trade war uncertainty?
The Fed is currently in a "wait and see" mode in deciding what is the reaction to Trump's trade policy. But is it possible for the Fed to be a bit more proactive than merely saying "we will be able to update you further when we know more details"?
Enters scenario analysis.
Bank of Canada Watch
The Bank of Canada on Wednesday decided to hold policy rate at 2.25% unchanged, as expected by markets. However, what is a notable is the Bank continues to show dovish bias given the recent rebound in economic data.
Blanchard’s “Policy Model” v “Theory Model”
Back in November last year, Professor Olivier Blanchard discussed with me about his view that there should be four types of macroeconomics, and "theory...
The Fed’s Interest Rate Policy Regime – Corridor System or Floor System
The Fed has changed it interest rate policy regime since 2008, from the so-called Corridor system, to the Floor system it is using right now. What is the different?
