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> At the very least the US will have some wiggle room to lower rates when the economy slows down again. While true, one of the lessons from 2008-9, and part of

> At the very least the US will have some wiggle room to lower rates when the economy slows down again. While true, one of the lessons from 2008-9, and part of Bernanke's point, is that monetary policy alone can't always accomplish the task. If we use up all the extra fuel in the run-up to a rough patch, we risk not having enough to get us out of the rut ahead.

nickik 8y ago
Yeah and he is wrong and telling a false history. Go back to 2008 and look at their policy and meeting. The fact is that they were talking about HIGH INFLATION in the meeting in late 2008. They did not lower interest rates to zero and had a policy of sterilization (selling bonds to buy troubled housing assets, instead of buying the troubled with new money). The did not even deliberately end this policy, the market forced them because they were running out of T-Bonds. Later the called this 'QE1' but it was not really QE, it was them preserving a minim of T-Bonds (and that's their own account). While they did go on to do QE1/QE2 they also payed interest on reserves to prevent that money from creating more inflation. And this was very deliberate policy, they explicitly said 'We are doing this to prevent the money from going out'. The fact is that while nominal income collapsed in 2008 the Fed did nothing while the economy collapsed, like Nero in Rome. How can you claim that a bank that can print infinite amounts of money could not do anything against this: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/ngdp_trend1.jpg https://oregoneconomicanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/n... Friedman, Bernanke and many others have written about how the central bank could do much at the zero bound and other countries like Switzerland showed that this is true. The Fed failed as a institutional because they didn't plan for 0% interest, not because its impossible to do anything.

nickik 8y ago

Yeah and he is wrong and telling a false history. Go back to 2008 and look at their policy and meeting. The fact is that they were talking about HIGH INFLATION in the meeting in late 2008. They did not lower interest rates to zero and had a policy of sterilization (selling bonds to buy troubled housing assets, instead of buying the troubled with new money). The did not even deliberately end this policy, the market forced them because they were running out of T-Bonds. Later the called this 'QE1' but it was not really QE, it was them preserving a minim of T-Bonds (and that's their own account). While they did go on to do QE1/QE2 they also payed interest on reserves to prevent that money from creating more inflation. And this was very deliberate policy, they explicitly said 'We are doing this to prevent the money from going out'. The fact is that while nominal income collapsed in 2008 the Fed did nothing while the economy collapsed, like Nero in Rome. How can you claim that a bank that can print infinite amounts of money could not do anything against this: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/ngdp_trend1.jpg https://oregoneconomicanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/n... Friedman, Bernanke and many others have written about how the central bank could do much at the zero bound and other countries like Switzerland showed that this is true. The Fed failed as a institutional because they didn't plan for 0% interest, not because its impossible to do anything.