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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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 Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 10:09 pm Post subject: Anna Schwartz blames Fed for sub-prime crisis |
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Anna Schwartz, who literally 'wrote the book' on monetary policy has come down hard on the Fed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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Anna Schwartz, the revered economist, shares her views on the credit bubble with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
As rebukes go in the close-knit world of central banking, few hurt as much as the scathing indictment of US Federal Reserve policy by Professor Anna Schwartz.
The high priestess of US monetarism - a revered figure at the Fed - says the central bank is itself the chief cause of the credit bubble, and now seems stunned as the consequences of its own actions engulf the financial system. "The new group at the Fed is not equal to the problem that faces it," she says, daring to utter a thought that fellow critics mostly utter sotto voce.
"They need to speak frankly to the market and acknowledge how bad the problems are, and acknowledge their own failures in letting this happen. This is what is needed to restore confidence," she told The Sunday Telegraph. "There never would have been a sub-prime mortgage crisis if the Fed had been alert. This is something Alan Greenspan must answer for," she says.
Schwartz remains defiantly lucid at 92. She still works every day at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where she has toiled since 1941.
Her fame comes from a joint opus with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman: A Monetary History of the United States. It revolutionised thinking on the causes of the Great Depression when published in 1965. The book blamed the Fed for causing the slump. The bank failed to use its full bag of tricks to stop the implosion of the money stock, and turned a bust into calamity by raising rates.
According to Schwartz the original sin of the Bernanke-Greenspan Fed was to hold rates at 1 per cent from 2003 to June 2004, long after the dotcom bubble was over. "It is clear that monetary policy was too accommodative. Rates of 1 per cent were bound to encourage all kinds of risky behaviour," says Schwartz.
She is scornful of Greenspan's campaign to clear his name by blaming the bubble on an Asian saving glut, which purportedly created stimulus beyond the control of the Fed by driving down global bond rates. "This attempt to exculpate himself is not convincing. The Fed failed to confront something that was evident. It can't be blamed on global events," she says.
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 6:25 pm Post subject: Re: Anna Schwartz blames Fed for sub-prime crisis |
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| thepeel wrote: |
Anna Schwartz,
According to Schwartz the original sin of the Bernanke-Greenspan Fed was to hold rates at 1 per cent from 2003 to June 2004, long after the dotcom bubble was over. "It is clear that monetary policy was too accommodative. Rates of 1 per cent were bound to encourage all kinds of risky behaviour," says Schwartz.
She is scornful of Greenspan's campaign to clear his name by blaming the bubble on an Asian saving glut, which purportedly created stimulus beyond the control of the Fed by driving down global bond rates. "This attempt to exculpate himself is not convincing. The Fed failed to confront something that was evident. It can't be blamed on global events," she says.
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Interesting. I didn't know that anyone was blaming it on an Asian saving glut. I always thought it was because of the 1% rate a few years back. I thought everyone else thought the same thing too. |
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