Previously published on Friday, June 10th, 2016 on pacbiztimes.com By Dan E. Hamilton Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has been engaged in an unprecedented experiment, one without any economic theory to recommend it. Its policies are internally inconsistent. Some work to restrict credit. Others ease credit. The 2007 failure of New Century Financial, a leading… Read more

Previously published on Friday, May 27th 2016 on pacbiztimes.com By Matthew Fienup As forecasts of torrential El Nino rains have given way to the hard reality of another year of drought on the Central Coast, calls to punish farmers or to seize farmers’ water are once again being voiced. Not only do these calls embody… Read more

In his book The End of Alchemy, former Bank of England Chairman Mervyn King has presented a riveting treatise on banking, monetary policy, financial crises and financial regulation.   The title of the book refers to what King calls the “alchemy” of banking, whereby liquid and safe deposits are transformed into illiquid, risky loans and securities. … Read more

We need to find a way to separate our fiscal and monetary policies. Previously published on June 17, 2016 on city-journal.org Never heard of fiscal dominance? Don’t worry, you have lots of company. Even many economists are unfamiliar with the term. That’s going to change, though, as more and more Western governments careen toward insolvency.… Read more

Like the Orcas at Sea World, the mortgage market has been coddled by government support for more than half a century.  Having decided Orcas would be better off in the wild, Sea World has announced that it will no longer seek to capture Orcas or to breed them in the park.  However, due to concern… Read more

When talking about the national debt, people tend to use absolute metrics like the size of the outstanding federal debt ($19 trillion total, $14 trillion held by the public) or ratios like the ratio the outstanding debt to GDP.  Instead of trying to fathom the raw numbers, it is a good idea to scale by… Read more

In previous blogs we have discussed appropriate debt levels for nonfinancial companies and for large banks.  What about for the individual household?  Sometimes, households are ‘credit-constrained’ in that they cannot find borrowers to lend them their desired amounts.  In economic booms, like the housing boom that preceded the 2007-2008 crisis, lending standards tend to soften… Read more

Previously published on April 14, 2016 on Newgeography.com  Most commentary on California’s decision to increase the state minimum wage to $15 over time is either along the lines of it being a boon to minimum-wage workers and their families or a disaster for California’s economy.  Neither is accurate.  Different regions sill see different outcomes.  Central… Read more

Large banks (think of Wells Fargo, Citicorp, JP Morgan and Bank of America) today hold equity capital roughly equal to about ten percent of total assets.  Inverting that ratio we get assets to equity of ten times or leverage as commonly defined (debt divided by equity, instead of assets divided by equity) of nine times. … Read more

In a recent made-for-TV movie actor Richard Dreyfuss plays hedge fund manager Bernie Madoff, creator of one of the all-time great Ponzi Schemes. A Ponzi Scheme, named after an Italian crook of the early 20th century, is a fraud in which a proprietor (like Bernie) accepts money from investors based on a claim to be… Read more