Recent quotes:

Department of "Huh?!": Martin Feldstein and the Interest Rate Path Edition - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Janet Yellen projects and wishes for unemployment to fall further, and is confident that when it falls further wage growth will reemerge and inflation climb back to its target. She is confident that if inflation climbs above its target she can quickly and substantially raise interest rates to bring inflation back to target. But she is not at all confident that if she raises interest rates as fast as Feldstein wishes and the economy weakens that she will then be able to strengthen it. Yet there is no acknowledgement of this asymmetry anywhere in Feldstein’s piece.
#Martin-Feldstein - equitablegrowth.org

Nighttime Must-Read: Paul Krugman: The Strange Urge to Raise Rates - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

“Monetary policy attracts crazy people like moths to a flame: goldbugs, 100-percent-reserve-banking types, amateur historians who think they know exactly what happened when Diocletian ruled Rome… …The obsession with raising interest rates among economists who used to seem sensible…. Up to a point, Feldstein has followed the now-usual arc…. We’re talking about conservatives with vast faith in the wisdom of markets, who somehow are completely sure that markets will make terrible decisions due to low interest rates, and require paternalistic monetary policy to keep them on the strait and narrow. What really strikes me about Marty’s latest… is the muttering that there must be some sinister hidden agenda…. that central banks are operating under… a desire to help finance budget deficits. It’s very, very strange, and distressing.
#Macroeconomics #Monetary-Policy #Paul-Krugman #Federal-Reserve #Martin-Feldstein #Interest-Rates - equitablegrowth.org

I Understand Where Martin Feldstein Starts: I Do Not Understand Where He Ends Up: Focus - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Vir illustris Martin Feldstein starts by saying: downward nominal price stickiness is such a thing that we do not have to worry about deflationary spirals in consumer prices. I agree. But I do not understand where his argument ends up: Martin Feldstein: The Deflation Bogeyman: “The world’s major central banks are currently obsessed with… raising their national inflation rates to… 2% per year…. …But is this a real problem?… Fortunately, we have relatively little experience with deflation to test the downward-spiral theory…
#Macroeconomics #Monetary-Policy #Finance #Fiscal-Policy #Martin-Feldstein #Systemic-Risk - equitablegrowth.org