Thursday, August 8, 2013

Janet Yellen: "A Wise and Humane Policy Is Occasionally to Let Inflation Rise"

What kind of policy thinking would Janet Yellen bring to the position of Fed chair?

WSJ's Mary Anastasia O'Grady reports on  some of clues from past statements made by her:
You don't have to be waging a war on women to be less than enthusiastic about the possibility of Janet Yellen heading the Federal Reserve. There are plenty of other reasons to object to her nomination, one of which is found in the transcripts of a 1995 Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

Republicans had taken the House in 1994 and expressed an interest in exploring the merits of inflation targeting as a monetary-policy tool, recalls Marvin Goodfriend, a former senior economist at the Richmond Fed, in the book "A Return to Jekyll Island: The Origins, History, and Future of the Federal Reserve." Chairman Alan Greenspan decided to hold a debate within the committee, and Richmond Fed President Al Broaddus took the pro side, while Ms. Yellen argued against inflation targeting[...]

Ms. Yellen told the committee that "the moral" of all this is "that the Fed should pursue multiple goals." She said that "when the goals conflict and it comes to calling for tough trade-offs, to me, a wise and humane policy is occasionally to let inflation rise even when inflation is running above target."
Bottom line: Yellen comes out of the economic school of thought that holds the view that printing money can somehow boost the economy. In essence, she holds the thought that the economy can somehow at times get stuck, that prices at such time don't adjust to supply and demand and that thus money needs to be printed by the Fed via Wall Street cronies to distort prices via monetary and price inflation and fool the public into doing transactions they wouldn't do without the distortions. This is what is held these days as "utterly unquestioned credentials."

3 comments:

  1. Yellen's views represent mainstream economic thought. What an embarrassment.

    Has this woman been in a coma the last two decades? Did she not live through the NASDAQ bubble? The housing bubble? Does the fact that the Fed has quadrupled its balance sheet since 2008 give her cause for concern? Nope, damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!

    The lunatics are definitely running the asylum.

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  2. Unrestrained printing paper money is how Germany was able to pay off war debt after World War One and World War Two. Each time paper money is printed with no restraint the result is ALWAYS extreme price inflation, near starvation for the masses in the nation, and much more - none of which is desired save for the elite few who moved their wealth out of the national currency.

    Ignoring history does not change it, ignoring history is simply ignoring external reality.

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  3. Didn't Obama state that he wanted a FED Chief that is more kind to the middle class? So what happened Obama, Wall ST. & the Corp. Banks ganged up on you & are blackmailing you by disclosing those pre-2008 secrets that you're trying to keep from the public? It's something like that because Yellen is far worse than helicopter Ben, who was a disaster for us middle class Americans.

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