5 ms·
Having seen a small fraction of the tooling that the Fed uses behind the scenes, I am now convinced that there is a fairly big gap between the publicly availabl
by areoform 5y ago
Having seen a small fraction of the tooling that the Fed uses behind the scenes, I am now convinced that there is a fairly big gap between the publicly available analysis + expertise v. the capabilities accessible to decision makers.
All decisions made by the Fed are made using comprehensive and sophisticated simulation tools, including tools that I'm under NDA and can't talk about. (However, I can say that the Fed is a customer, as that is publicly available information) Only a small fraction of this tooling is available publicly in the form of, FRB/US - https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/us-models-package.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/us-models-package.htm , FLARE - https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/testing-bank-resiliency-through-time-20220318.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/test... and whatever ABBA is, https://search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=ofr&query=agent-based+model+approach&commit= https://search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=ofr&query=agent-base...
When the policy makers are running millions of simulations with real-time transaction data + inputs, what utility does all of the fretting and "analysis" in the media have?
The system has become extremely dense and opaque, and what is in the public realm seems to be decoupled from the policy making + expertise. At best, the public can learn from footnotes that the Fed intends to (and has) pursued simulations to track, forecast & calibrate its policies,
> 29 To facilitate analysis of settlement disruptions, systems may need to develop the capability to simulate credit and liquidity effects on participants and on the system resulting from one or more participant defaults, or other possible sources of settlement disruption. Such simulations may need to include, if appropriate, the effects of changes in market prices, volatilities, or other factors.
Tools are only as good as the people who use them. We need more transparency into the decision making aids, as well as greater access to help people understand how the economy is managed as a system.
But until then, all this media doom and gloom isn't helping.
- ramesh31 5y agoI tend to trust the Fed as well. They saved us from total collapse in '08, and made the COVID recession the shortest one on record. I think after 40 years of practice we're starting to get pretty good at this MMT thing.
- satellite2 5y agoMMT requires excess reserves to be absorbed by taxation. Taxation has not be increased since the beginning of the quantitative easing interventions. MMT has never been tested.
- amrocha 5y agoMMT isn't something you test, it's a framework for explaining what happens in economies. Regardless of what policy decisions are made, MMT has been very accurate at predicting market reactions.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoMMT isn't just an explanation. It's also predictions - if the Fed and the Treasury do X, the result will be Y. And even recommendations: if the circumstances are A, the correct policy response is B. Those things can be tested - and haven't been. So far, nobody has taken the policy recommendations where they differ from mainstream econ, and (to my knowledge) we haven't been in places where MMT's predictions differ from mainstream econ's.
- amrocha 5y agoMMT does not make policy recommendations. Maybe the people behind it make recommendations based on the predictive power of MMT. MMT has been WAY better than mainstream economics at predicting market movements, most easily seen in Japan.
- areoform 5y agoI don't "trust" them, because I don't trust any small group of extremely smart people. It's easy for group think to occur, and for the group to construct brittle systems that go horribly wrong. If we had more eyes + more critiques, we could debug their thinking & see where it's going. That being said, the policy makers and the economists at the Fed are far more capable than most people think. They've gotten a lot right, and proven most naysayers wrong. But the question is, how long will that record last?