America's Economic Future – A Discussion By Ted Kavadas
The following commentary and chart is excerpted from the October 14, 2010 ContraryInvestor.com commentary. I find it interesting in a variety of different ways, and it raises a lot of questions with regard to the stock market, consumer confidence, QE1, and QE2… _____ “We have not touched on consumer confidence for a good while, but …
Monday’s (August 9) Barron’s had an article titled “Time to Print, Print, Print.” The article provides an overview of the concept of Quantitative Easing (QE) in the context of our current economic situation. I don’t agree with many of its conclusions and insinuations, however. In particular, the article seems overly positive on the idea of …
Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi released a paper dated July 27 titled “How The Great Recession Was Brought To An End.” (pdf) From the report, page 1: “In this paper, we use the Moody’s Analytics model of the U.S. economy—adjusted to accommodate some recent financial-market policies—to simulate the macroeconomic effects of the government’s total policy …
John Taylor’s May 21 blog post discusses the stimulus multiplier used for the ARRA and new research from the IMF with regard to actual stimulus multipliers. The chart shown has immense significance on a variety of fronts, assuming that the IMF research is representative of the effectiveness of stimulus spending. We, as a nation, do …
I found this passage from Milton Friedman in 1958, as seen on John B. Taylor’s blog, to be notable, especially given the immense monetary and fiscal policy actions taken to “improve” our economic situation: “The available evidence…casts grave doubt on the possibility of producing any fine adjustments in economic activity by fine adjustments in monetary …
John B. Taylor had a blog post on May 1, 2010 that discussed the impact of government stimulus on GDP. The post is titled “Latest Data Continue to Show Little Impact of Government Stimulus on GDP.” _____ One of the reasons that I write extensively about interventions, which includes stimulus programs, is that I believe …
The April 19 BusinessWeek has a story titled “The Case for More Stimulus,” along with this interesting accompanying chart (pdf), “Stimulus That Makes a Difference.” Of course, those familiar with this blog know that I tend to disagree with this type of article on various fronts. One question (among many) that supporters of further stimulus …
Saturday’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the latest housing intervention plan in a story titled “Mortgage Plan Remodeled Again.” I have written extensively about the residential real estate problems and dynamics thereof. It strongly appears as if we, as a nation, have come to a place where there is hardly a real estate intervention that we …
On Thursday President Obama signed the HIRE Act, a jobs stimulus. The summary of the signing can be found here. There is also a transcript of his remarks found here. I could make many comments about this jobs stimulus. However, as an intervention measure, it has many of the same characteristics of other interventions. As …
Up to this point, I have yet to mention “Keynes” or any derivative thereof. The reason for this is simple – I don’t believe that the efforts taken to stimulate the economy are reflective of the theories that Keynes espoused. Instead, they are a type of “bastardized” Keynesian Theory – used by various parties in …