gut;1570820 wrote:At least people had jobs under Reagan-Bush policies. Bush/Reagan never laundered money to the rich via the Fed.
It really takes some kind of hubris to post around here the kinds of self-aggrandizing statements it appears you have done of late about your own views, especially as someone who is sympathetic to markets, when the most preeminent free-market economist since WWII would dismiss the acrimony behind this statement out of hand.
Federal Reserve policy has been steadily moving toward using the credit and asset price channels of monetary transmission to hit its targets since at least the early 70's when inflation got built into wages. I haven't been able to post much lately but I see that you're running around here saying you "know" economics and yet a statement like: "Bush/Reagan never laundered money to the rich via the Fed" to the entirety of the Friedman/Keynes post WWII thinking on macroeconomics. As if Obama, Reagan or Bush had any real control over Fed policy in any event. If anything, FED policy has been captured by ZIRP hating rentiers in the business world who have pressured Bernanke and co. against using the "Rooseveltian Resolve" he called for when he was an academic that would be necessary for pure monetary stimulus alone to really work.
Unconventional monetary policy has proven more effective than I thought it could be. Milton Friedman and his followers have been right where I was wrong. You on the other hand, are totally off the map of reality considering you oppose both monetary stimulus and fiscal stimulus to bring us back to full employment and potential output.
The only thing that is going to lead to more jobs and growth is either, A. More expansionary monetary policy as Milton Friedman would suggest and the FED is trying to do now, B. A higher inflation target to lower the real interest rate as New Keynesians like Krugman would've suggest before the mask came off or C. More expansionary Fiscal Policy (hoping that the FED doesn't offset it with tight monetary policy) like Keynes the original would've called for through either large direct transfers....i.e. giving cash to people we know with certainty that they will spend it like food stamps; or, large tax cuts...i.e. giving people more cash for their current output and increasing incentives for new output and hoping that the money is spent...or large increases in direct government expenditures...i.e. giving people cash for new output, knowing with certainty that it is spent.
All in all it amounts the fact that nominal spending has to go up and it has to come from some where, either the government or the private sector, in all likelihood induced by some government policy (i.e. QE and Forward Guidance inducing people to take out loans or borrow against higher valued assets, tax cuts, or handing the private sector cash, etc).
You are the economics expert here and yet you reject Milton Friedman and the prescriptions of the Neo-Monetarists calling it "laundering money to the rich", you reject the prescriptions of the New-Keynesians which make up pretty much every major economics institution in the world from the FED, the World Bank, the IMF, etc. and I've seen you re-ject old school keynesianism as "quackery".
You simply can't have it both ways and yet you have snobbish contempt for people who might disagree. It is one thing to be a monetarist and reject the necessity or usefulness running deficits and using fiscal stimulus, etc. But, you can't be a monetary hawk and a deficit hawk or you're going to have a depression. If it were not for Ben Bernanke and his alleged "money laundering to the rich" we would have had a depression, just like in the Great Depression when we had tight money and tight fiscal policy. If you don't want to "launder money to the rich" then you've got two choices, 1). Fiscal Stimulus of some kind...perhaps tax cuts if you're a free-marketer or 2). Depression.
You can run around here acting all condescending and arrogant like you like to do, resulting to smug insults about how stupid everyone else is at every chance you get but thankfully the United States and its policy makers, whatever their flaws, as a whole are smart enough not to listen to people like yourself who call for tight money and tight fiscal policies in periods of depressed nominal spending (there are plenty) and we are liberated from having to find out just how wrong this type of thinking is.
Europe on the other hand, is exhibit A. Tight Monetary Policy under current conditions that would repulse Milton Friedman and oppressive fiscal policy that would disgust John Maynard Keynes....but you'll just sit here and say that the youth unemployment rate in Spain is 57.7% because those Damn Socialists don't want to work, etc. etc. Complete liquidationist Derp that was refuted 100 years ago.
