Friday, April 17, 2009

It's Baaaack!

The Shadow Open Market Committee (SOMC) is meeting, again. This will be the first meeting in three years. The last tme SOMC met, Ben Bernanke was only in his job as Chairman of the Fed for 3 months.

SOMC was founded by Prof. Karl Brunner of the University of Rochester and Prof. Allan Meltzer of Carnegie-Mellon University. It held its first semi-annual meeting on September 14, 1973. The original objective was to evaluate the policy choices and actions of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee (FOMC).

Although not Austrian by any definition, throughout the 1970s and early-1980s, the Committee consistently blamed the Fed for contributing to the inflation of that period.

Returning members to the SOMC for this session are Professor Gregory Hess of Claremont McKenna College, Mickey Levy of Bank of America, Professor Bennett McCallum of Carnegie Mellon University, and Anna Schwartz of NBER.

New SOMC members are Professor Michael Bordo of Rutgers University, Professor Charles Calomiris of Columbia University, and Professor Marvin Goodfriend of Carnegie Mellon University.

The papers to be presented and discussed at the April 2009 "Shadow" symposium are:

Michael Bordo: "The Great Contraction 1929-1933: Are There Parallels to the Current Crisis?"

Charles Calomiris: "The Dos and Don'ts of Financial Regulatory Reform" and "TALF and PPIP:
Will they Work to Unclog the Financial Plumbing?"

Marvin Goodfriend: "We Need an Accord for Fed Credit Policy"

Mickey Levy: "What's in Worse Shape, the Economy or Fiscal Policy?"

Bennett McCallum: "China, the U.S. Dollar, and SDRs"

Anna Schwartz: "Boundaries Between the Fed and the Treasury"

Gregory Hess will be moderating.

HT-Jack Krupansky

No comments:

Post a Comment