Tag: FRB

The Family Financial Facility: Urgent, Overdue, Equitable Fed Support for Those Most in Need

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By Karen Petrou

As I write this, thousands of small businesses are clamoring for urgent SBA loans and so many Americans are filing for unemployment insurance that systems have crumpled across the country.  At the same time, the S&P rose over three percent since Monday’s open.  The reason for this dissonance lies in the fact that key parts of the financial market have been bailed out while ordinary borrowers are stuck and then some.  Saving markets won’t salvage the economy – at its root, the U.S. is a consumption-driven economy.  If consumers can’t survive, neither will the economy.  The Fed must add a Family Financial Facility to all those it has crafted for the financial market and it should open one fast.  In this crisis, time is truly money and money is what most families don’t have.

Continue reading “The Family Financial Facility: Urgent, Overdue, Equitable Fed Support for Those Most in Need” →

Wheelies on the Yield Curve:  Inequality, Disintermediation and the Hazards of New QE

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By Karen Petrou

Starting with our very first EconomicEquality blog post, we demonstrated the direct link between quantitative easing (QE) and the sharp rise in U.S. wealth inequality that differentiates this recovery from all that came before.  QE exacerbates inequality because, combined with post-crisis rules and ultra-low rates, it creates a market dynamic in which banks hold huge excess-reserve balances instead of making equality-essential loans and markets relentlessly chase yield, increasing equity valuations and driving credit to borrowers such as highly-leveraged companies.  In 2019, the Fed bulked up its portfolio in what is now known as QE-lite in hopes of rescuing the repo market, reinvigorating sputtering equity markets no matter the Fed’s ongoing insistence that this round of portfolio increases isn’t QE. Continue reading “Wheelies on the Yield Curve:  Inequality, Disintermediation and the Hazards of New QE” →

Dark Corners in “Good Places”

~ Karen Petrou ~ 4 Comments

By Karen Petrou and Matthew Shaw

Shortly before Thanksgiving, a new study documented that U.S. life expectancy since 2010 has taken a sharp turn for the worse for younger Americans regardless of race, gender, or education.  We knew that opioids were devastating, but this study confirmed others showing also that the overall reversal in U.S. life expectancy is due to more profound and mysterious afflictions.  Doctors are flummoxed by why U.S. mortality is so much higher than that in other advanced countries, where life expectancy continues to increase for younger citizens, concluding that something endemic is going on behind the epidemic of “diseases of despair.”  The latest inequality data demonstrate yet again that the economic “good place”  that comforts Fed policy-makers is to be found only in the 100th floor penthouses that are the eyries of the one percent.  We thought the data more than dispiriting when we analyzed the Fed’s first distributional financial account; now, we find them devastating, not to mention evil omens of a polarized, angry electorate heading to the 2020 polls. Continue reading “Dark Corners in “Good Places”” →

“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” →

Public Wealth and Private Worth: The Inequality Impact of Deficit Spending

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

By Karen Petrou

Progressive Democrats have recently touted modern monetary theory – i.e., that deficits don’t matter – to press social-welfare spending.  Similarly dismissive of deficits, the Trump Administration and many Republicans now cotton to giant trickle-down individual tax cuts.  But, deficits do matter not just for fiscal hawks, but also for equality advocates.  A new IMF study takes an unprecedented look at U.S. public wealth since 1946, concluding that lots less public wealth undermines the ability of fiscal policy to alleviate economic downturns.  Continue reading “Public Wealth and Private Worth: The Inequality Impact of Deficit Spending” →