Tag: Congress

Dialing for Dollars: Solving CBDC’s Equality Conundrum

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

By Karen Petrou

  • CBDC advocates tout its inclusiveness, but the digital divide is a profoundly exclusionary impediment to CBDC access for LMI, disabled, older, and rural households. 
  • Centralized deposit-taking and payments via the Post Office and/or Fed pose challenges to personal privacy and even freedom of expression that, if not averted in initial design, could come to pose significant political and governance risk.  Lack of private competition also presents discrimination risk based on pricing or other terms not subject to outside scrutiny.
  • If CBDC succeeds as some envision it, then lending will come either from the federal government – Big Brother problems of still more concern – or capital-markets sources outside the perimeter of safety-and-soundness and often also consumer-protection regulation and enforcement.
  • A CBDC in which the Fed acts as an open-source utility corrects for many current inclusion, governance, and intermediation obstacles to payment-system speed and efficiency. 
Continue reading “Dialing for Dollars: Solving CBDC’s Equality Conundrum” →

Bad Things about the Good Place and How to Pretty It Back Up

~ Karen Petrou ~ 2 Comments

By Karen Petrou

  • Pre-COVID inequality evidenced itself instantly in post-COVID consumer-finance extremis.
  • A unique construct of ground-up recovery policies is an essential, urgent response.
  • Regulatory revisions would help and long-overdue equitable liquidity facilities would do still more.
  • New public guarantees are critical.

Ever since the U.S. economy crept out of recession, the Fed has represented its slow, inequitable recovery as a “good place.”  Its own 2018 economic well-being survey contradicted this and the latest data released on May 14 are no better before COVID came and a lot worse thereafter.  These data make it still more clear that the Fed must quickly reorient its trickle-down rescues to move money starting at ground level, but even that won’t be sufficient given the magnitude of COVID’s economic impact.  The combination of macroeconomic harm and financial-system hurt also requires a reset in which new public guarantees for prudent private financing fully recognized by new rules play a major part. Continue reading “Bad Things about the Good Place and How to Pretty It Back Up” →

“People’s QE” and Noblesse Oblige

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

By Karen Petrou

As the chimera of the post-crisis recovery fades and central bankers find themselves powerless to reverse recession, “people’s quantitative easing” is gaining attention as a tool a growing number of central bankers fancy gives them a new way to wreak their beneficent will.  People’s QE – also known more colorfully as “helicopter money” – means that, despairing of fiscal-policy remedies, central banks print money and then either just give it to the people or invest it in assets they or their bosses think best for equalizing, trade-deficit dropping, climate-restoring, or other all-to-the-good economic growth.  However, it’s not just central bankers casting longing eyes at the ability of central banks to print money – officials ranging from those in the Trump Administration to the Democratic Socialist candidate for President see it as a new way to do what they think are the voter’s bidding without raising the deficit.  This is really, really central banking, but for all its power, it’s very problematic.  QE so far has done little to spur sustained recovery and much to make the U.S. even more unequal.  There’s no reason to believe a people’s QE will be any better. Continue reading ““People’s QE” and Noblesse Oblige” →

Cosmopolites, Financiers, Monopolists, and the 2020 Election

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By Karen Petrou

…foreign competitors get to make the goods, and we just buy them.
And then they buy up American companies with the profits.  And
yes, in this bargain there are lots of jobs—jobs on Wall Street, or in
Hollywood, or in Silicon Valley…At the same time, it has encouraged
multinational corporations to move jobs and assets overseas to chase
the cheapest wages and pay the lowest taxes.  And it has rewarded
these same corporations for then turning around and investing their
profits not in American workers, not in American development, but in
financial instruments that benefit the cosmopolitan elite.  And where
has this left middle America?  With flat wages, with lost jobs, with
with declining investment and declining opportunity.  We don’t make
things here anymore—at least, not the kinds of things a normal person
without a fancy degree can build with his hands. Continue reading “Cosmopolites, Financiers, Monopolists, and the 2020 Election” →

2020’s Equality Policies 101

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By Karen Petrou

On July 18, the Economic Policy Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee turned its attention from the panel’s usual agenda to an unusual hearing on the challenges posed by U.S. economic inequality and what Congress might actually do about them.  For the first time, we saw a shared belief by senators on both sides of the aisle and diverse witnesses that, over the past two decades, Americans have become mired in the income and wealth into which they are born.  This isn’t exactly a news flash – see our prior blog posts on how unequal America has become and our most recent one on the dearth of public resources with which to counter fierce economic downdrafts.  However, it isn’t just that senators finally discovered inequality – it’s that the outline of a bipartisan response took shape.  Thus, for all the difficulty in Congress doing anything about even something as critical as economic inequality, the session was a break-out moment. Continue reading “2020’s Equality Policies 101” →