Item! Somewhere in between stifling the urge to can the Supreme Court and accusing reporters of treason, President Bush has tapped the Business School’s resident inflation dove, Frederic Mishkin, to fill a spot on the Fed’s seven-member board of governors.
Why does this matter, besides saving the students who made that music video commiserating with Glenn Hubbard, the B-School dean who didn’t get to be Fed Chairman, the trouble of making another one? Our anonymous tipster opines that Mishkin’s selection signals a fundamental shift in Fed policy: from stomping out inflation before it has a chance to spawn to allowing it to reach tadpole size and continue swimming unmolested. Which is odd, considering the GOP has traditionally been the party of inflation hawks, and doesn’t typically move towards policies already embraced by Canadian and European central banks.
But enough about monetary theory. Bwog is still waiting for its Stiglitz-Bernanke death match!
13 Comments
@hot tip fireflys. lightning bugs. south lawn. catch them while you can. smear them into mush and make yourself some alien facepaint
@item what is it with folks just havign to lie about bush to attack him? he never said anything about treason about the ny times thematic reporting (notice how they have a tendency to find stories that fit in themes as opposed to just presenting new?)
and don’t talk about the supreme court until after you get out of law school..maybe not even then…
hamdan had nothing to do w/the constitution in the way you’re thinking about it and was really a statutory interpretation case..and if anything, minimalists and sunstein’s so called perfectionists will want to do away w/the court (the last one who really wanted to change its character was your God FDR) after the next bush appointment
@yo no one cares. really.
@seems like an unusual teaser then if it specifically commented on it…somebody obviously thinks they can get away w/bs…and being terse doesn’t make you any less idiotic
as for #10..if you have nothing of substance to contribute to a discussion besides ad hominems why waste perfectly good oxygen that the rest of us can use?
@if you're out of law school... which I presume you are since you’re commenting on the Supreme court…
then why are you on this site?
@does this mean my savings account interest will keep increasing too? because its jumped 3/4 of a point already.
@News Yes.
Interest and bond rates are *usually* (but not always) the Fed funds rate + something.
@uh mishkin is an inflation hawk. i expect 5 3/4 by the end of this year
@News Lehman Brothers Research says 5.5 by August, then a pause, and then a final hike to 5.75 by October.
Barclays is betting money on 6 by year’s end.
Of course, this was pre-FOMC announcement. So who knows. Maybe 5.5 will be the last one. Or maybe it’ll be a final 50 bps hike.
@hey always great to see a tipster who just took principles try to reduce mishkin’s stance to ‘dove’ despite the fact that its more nuanced than that. I mean it’s obvious that inflation ‘doves’ actually maliciously allow inflation to grow becuase they purposely want to inflict harm with their monetary policy.
By the way..olson, who’s the departing gov., was an economist who actually advised eastern european bankers early in his career, and there are several other governors who have experience with those countries (its also unlikely you’ll see the GOP or dems for that matter “embrace” policies currently in place for Canada and Eastern Europe.)
On another note, in maybe just as significant a position, debra livingston (vice dean at the law school) has been nominated for a seat on the powerful 2nd circuit court of appeals. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/06/06/livingston.html
The only thing is with Manning being scooped up by Harvard and Livingston possibly gone, expect the law school to hire a conservative and/or maybe moderate (in the meaningless political sense) law prof
@regarding law school hirings…prof. hemphill and hamburger are probably the ‘replacement’ righty hirings (though its unfair to reduce their scholarship to just that)
Incoming Profs Wu and Emens may be more interesting however, the latter being one of the earliest mainstream profs to use the springboard of the lawrence opinion to an argument for group marriages–an opinion which has already sent the nro to declare ‘rick santorum was right/the sky is falling’
@fuck mammon where’s the poetry, b&w?
@dorkonomist It’s a bit premature to start sounding warnings about a “fundamental shift”, but Bernanke and Mishkin were a two-person tag-team in their pre-Fed days. It is a bit odd that both were appointed (pretty much as a team) inside of six months. Hmmm….