He's Got the Whole World In His Hands

Peter Kilander peterk at enteract.com
Wed Sep 29 19:21:02 PDT 1999


Anyone else read the piece in the current New York Review of Books on Alan Greenspan by Roger Alcaly? http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?19991007035R

(It's free but a pain in the ass since they give you two paragraphs or so and then you have to click "continue")

Alcaly formerly taught economics at Columbia University, is a principal of Mount Lucas Management Corporation, an investment firm in Princeton, New Jersey.

In it Alcaly reviews _Inflation, Unemployment, and Monetary Policy_ by Robert M. Solow, John B. Taylor, and Alvin Hansen and _Central Banking in Theory and Practice_ by Alan S. Blinder. Some things that struck me about the article:

1. "Still others, such as populist critics of the Fed like William Greider, "new era" advocates, and the Wall Street Journal's editors, would have the Fed concentrate on reducing unemployment and stimulating growth, and pay much less attention to inflation." I was under the impression that the wacky crew over at the Wall Steet Journal were inflation hawks.

2. "Clinton's recent appointee Laurence Meyer, on the other hand, is one of the Fed's most hawkish members." Hmmm. I seem to remember Clinton getting his undies all in a bunch over the sudden realization that the bond market had boxed him into a Eisenhowerian Republican economic policy early in his first term.

Peter



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