Recent quotes:

Things I Won't Have Time to Say II: Rethinking Macro Policy III Conference, Washington D.C., April 15-16 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Take the mechanics of demand stabilization and management off the table. Move, in our imagination at least, into a world in which short-term safe nominal interest rates rarely if ever hit the zero nominal bound. In that world, as a result, the full employment and price stability stabilization-policy mission could be left to central banks and monetary policy. Furthermore, confine our thinking to the North Atlantic, possibly plus Japan. It seems to me then that there are four big remaining questions: Can, in a political-economy sense, central banks be trusted with this mission? Are they not captured, to too great an extent, by the commercial-banking sector that, myopically, favors higher nominal interest rates to directly improve bank cash flows and indirectly dampen inflation and so redistribute wealth to nominal creditors–like banks? What is the proper size of the twenty-first century public sector? What is the proper size of the public debt for (a) countries that do possess exorbitant privilege because they do issue reserve currencies, and (b) countries that do not? What are the real risks associated with the public debt in the context of historically-low present and anticipated future interest rates?
#Rethinking-Macro-Policy - equitablegrowth.org

Things I Won't Have Time to Say: Rethinking Macro Policy III Conference, Washington D.C., April 15-16 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

It could have turned out very differently. It could have been–as those of us who more-or-less hooted Raghu Rajan down at Jackson Hole in August 2005 wrongly thought—-that the money-center universal banks did understand their derivatives books; that asset-price innovation variances did drift up or down with time relatively slowly; that the weak point in the global economy in the mid 2000s was the global imbalance of the US trade deficit, and the possibility that some large bad actor had been selling unhedged dollar puts on a very large scale–not the subprime mortgages on houses built in the desert between Los Angeles and Albuquerque, and the use of securities based on those subprime mortgages as core banking reserves.
#Rethinking-Macro-Policy - equitablegrowth.org