Housing
Business & Economics
Memo To The Fed: Stop Those Rate Cuts
The markets rallied last Tuesday in response to the Fed’s growing assistance to holders of mortgage-backed securities. Yet many onlookers are convinced that an aggressive cut in the federal funds rate at the upcoming March 18 meeting is still necessary to avoid a painful recession. In our view, further loosening ...
Business & Economics
Making the Mortgage Mess Worse
Recently the Bush administration unveiled a plan for homeowners facing foreclosure to receive a 30-day reprieve from their creditors. This might come as welcome news in Sacramento where a jaw-dropping 46 percent of December sales were foreclosed homes. Unfortunately, the latest plan-as well as earlier government ideas to freeze rate ...
Business & Economics
Fed Was `Premature’ to Cut Rates, Former Central Banker Says
Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve was too quick to reduce interest rates today in an emergency move after global stock markets tumbled, a former Fed president said. “It strikes me as very premature,” Lee Hoskins, former president of the Cleveland Fed, said in an interview after the central ...
Business & Economics
The Fed Painted Into a Keynesian Corner
Although one sympathizes with Ben Bernanke—after all, it wasn’t his fault that Greenspan handed him an economy rigged with ticking housing and mortgage bombs—the harsh reality is that the Federal Reserve can’t create prosperity. Strip away all the pomp and glamour of “open market operations” and the like, and we’re ...
Memo To The Fed: Stop Those Rate Cuts
The markets rallied last Tuesday in response to the Fed’s growing assistance to holders of mortgage-backed securities. Yet many onlookers are convinced that an aggressive cut in the federal funds rate at the upcoming March 18 meeting is still necessary to avoid a painful recession. In our view, further loosening ...
Making the Mortgage Mess Worse
Recently the Bush administration unveiled a plan for homeowners facing foreclosure to receive a 30-day reprieve from their creditors. This might come as welcome news in Sacramento where a jaw-dropping 46 percent of December sales were foreclosed homes. Unfortunately, the latest plan-as well as earlier government ideas to freeze rate ...
Fed Was `Premature’ to Cut Rates, Former Central Banker Says
Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve was too quick to reduce interest rates today in an emergency move after global stock markets tumbled, a former Fed president said. “It strikes me as very premature,” Lee Hoskins, former president of the Cleveland Fed, said in an interview after the central ...
The Fed Painted Into a Keynesian Corner
Although one sympathizes with Ben Bernanke—after all, it wasn’t his fault that Greenspan handed him an economy rigged with ticking housing and mortgage bombs—the harsh reality is that the Federal Reserve can’t create prosperity. Strip away all the pomp and glamour of “open market operations” and the like, and we’re ...
