which may confuse some people, but shouldn’t. Here is the graph of the June Gilt future since March: As this story indicates, yields are now at a very low level. Good news? Well, no. A naive, political interpretation of this would be: the Conservative government has impressed the market that it has borrowing under control. [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Monetary policy’
14 May
Some stuff to add learning and entertainment to a sunny weekend
Sorry, I am in a sunny mood. Martin Wolf is also infected with the sun, because he comes out with a surprisingly generous verdict on The economic legacy of Mr Brown. The general theme is that his mistakes were shared by most of the economic policymaking world, and Wolf makes this telling point: “In retrospect, [...]
13 May
Now is not a time for uber-German monetary policy
The FT reports on the ECB’s seeming conversion to QE: Backlash stirs in Frankfurt. “Germans are clear about the job of a central banker: to fight inflation, and nothing else … The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described the turnaround – announced at 3:15am on Monday after a late-night meeting of European finance ministers – as [...]
4 May
Rebalancing quietly taking place …
Well, what is this all about? The trend in the gilt market: Recall two pieces of conventional wisdom. One, the end of QE spelt doom to gilts. Take away that one big sucker-buyer and they will fall out of bed*. Two, if there’s a hung parliament, the great British Politician will spend months and months [...]
29 Apr
Ignoring the Hippopotamus next door …
Well, if our own deficit is the Elephant in the Room, what is a nearby E300bn economy heading to bankruptcy? Will future post-election commentators wonder what on earth the Guardian was doing running so many different columns on bigotgate while the next economic crisis burst upon our shores? (to be fair to the Guardian, they [...]
15 Apr
Some economics, for once
Not only that, but a couple of real papers, from the Macroeconomics blog I subscribe to. The first has empirically proven something that motivates monetary thinkers like Scott Sumner, who depend (too much, you might say) on the idea of the Fed working through expectations management. The basic view is very simple: the Fed can [...]
28 Mar
A fitting moment to announce Q-day
Which will mean nothing to anyone reading. But since I started writing about Quantitative Easing, I have had a Google alert feeding into my Google Reader, triggered by news containing the words “quantitative easing”. This has fed about 50 items a week into my already stuffed inBox, and as some kind of punishment I have [...]
25 Mar
I had hoped this would happen: US attention
The US blogosphere – in particular Scott Sumner – was a major influence in getting my thick head around the advantages of Nominal Growth Targetting as an answer to the world’s problems. Hey, if I had not started on Sumner’s blog I would never have written Credit Where It’s Due. So I am now rather [...]
25 Mar
Two pieces I’d wished I’d written
Together, they make the arguments for Credit Where It’s Due far better than I managed. The arguments being: don’t worry about inflation right now, and a nominal growth target is superior. First Hat Tip to Luis commenting here, for the link to this blogpost: “Target the Cause not the Symptom“. It is worth reading twice [...]
1 Mar
‘Credit where it’s due’ is launched today
CentreForum’s latest piece of research is launched today: our first major economics report since A Balancing Act won Think Tank Publication of the Year.
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