Thursday, September 18, 2008

Famous Economists Agree with Me :-) :-)

From WSJ Real Time Economics Blog: Economists React to Damage Limitation

While people may wish to speculate that the massive $180bn expansion in the Fed’s FX facilities vis a vis other central banks could result in a “quid pro quo” easing by the ECB, we do not think this is likely — unless the financial sector were to move into such deep turmoil that such operational changes as we saw annonuced today were no longer to prove effective, in which case a drastic confidence-building coordinated interest rate easing were to unfold. … We continue to argue that the ECB is strongly committed to the separation of its monetary policy operations from money market operations, and that today’s announcement (and indeed recent US developments, including the Fed standing pat on its own policy rate on Tuesday) simply reinforces that distinction - i.e. it demonstrates that central banks are willing to go to quite extreme measures to supply liquidity in order to ensure orderly money markets, while setting their key policy interest rate on the basis of their assessment of future inflation risks. –Julian Callow, economist with Barclays Capital in London

See my post of yesterday.