The economic crisis that has gripped the US economy since 2007 has highlighted Congress's limited oversight of the Federal Reserve, and the limited transparency of the Fed’s actions. And since a Fed promise is ultimately a Treasury promise that carries the full faith and credit of the US...

This working paper presents a debate, which begins with Bret Fiebiger arguing that the approach to monetary and financial macroeconomics which terms itself "modern monetary theory” does not have sound analytic foundations and is of little relevance empirically. Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie...

Scott Fullwiler and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray review the roles of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury in the context of quantitative easing, and find that the financial crisis has highlighted the limited oversight of Congress and the limited transparency of the Fed. And since a Fed promise...

Beyond its original mission to "furnish an elastic currency" as lender of last resort and manager of the payments system, the Federal Reserve has always been responsible (along with the Treasury) for regulating and supervising member banks. After World War II, Congress directed the Fed to pursue...

The outstanding economist Hyman Minsky was always skeptical of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. It assumed, he wrote, that economic growth itself would be adequate to eliminate poverty. But Minsky believed that there were structural problems that always left too many people without jobs or with...

Modern governments with a floating currency face no inherent financial constraints. Unfortunately, most modern macro-theorists continue to write as if these nations were financially constrained by (1) the magnitude of current tax "revenue" and (2) the private sector's willingness to "finance"...

This economist thinks that private debt got too far out of hand in the 1990s to make a recovery and economic expansion easy to achieve. He wants the federal government, among other things, to bail out the states and perhaps loosen its fiscal posture well beyond the short run.

Many economists, journalists, and public policy officials have argued that speculation has had little to do with the recent rapid run-up in the price of oil. If true, a case for regulation of oil markets would be more difficult to make. But the author examines the evidence in detail and finds it...

This paper examines Chairman Greenspan's recent claim that central bankers around the world have been operating 'as if' monetary policy were constrained by gold that backs up reserves. The paper argues, instead, that central banks in flexible exchange rate regimes operate with an overnight...

The credit crunch of 1966 has long been recognized as the first significant postwar financial crisis, and it was the first verification of the ''financial instability hypothesis'' that Minsky had been developing since the late 1950s. In the midst of the robust post-war expansion, the Fed...