Tag Archives: Eccles

This is a bit old. The Economic Report of the President was published a while ago. I just was looking recently, essentially because it has a chapter on the 70th anniversary of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The report discusses the role of Leon Keyserling, the second chair of the CEA, but the most relevant one in the early period, who, like Eccles at the Fed, tends to be a relatively underestimated and forgotten influence on the rise of Keynesian economics (that's in this chapter)....

So last weekend I was at the Eastern Economic Association meetings, and I presented with Steve Bannister (on and off contributor to NK) a paper on Quantitative Easing in the 1930s. It's been a while since we looked at this work, which started long ago (4 years at least). One point worth noticing is that while most accounts of Eccles performance at the Fed suggest that he didn't do much (see Meltzer in his A History of the Federal Reserve), we suggest that he was crucial in pushing...

A short Letter to the Editor, but worth reading. He clearly explains the policy failure since the global crisis and the reasons for the current problems in financial markets in developed and developing countries. He says: The adage that, in the absence of the prospect of growing demand, cheap money amounts to “pushing on a string” has been once again confirmed in advanced economies by the slowest recovery from any modern recession. Instead of funding real investment, monetary expansion has...

Curried Keynesianism in action   The review with an intro can be read here (or here). Currie is often considered the first Keynesian in the Roosevelt administration (I suggested here that, while not a professional economist, that merit goes to Eccles), and was also the first to work in the White House, before the Employment Act and the creation of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). He was also later unjustly attacked as a Soviet spy, and Roger Sandilands has dealt with this here...

Richard Clarida gave an interview (right at the beginning of the podcast) on why the Fed should increase the rate of interest. He also said that the Fed can affect inflation, which, he correctly points out, is denied by several economists. However, the degree of confusion on this subject is significant, and modern monetary theory, and its implications for central banking behavior, is, in part, responsible for that.The conventional wisdom on what central banks can do (and one can think of...