{"id":1815,"date":"2008-10-19T11:24:25","date_gmt":"2008-10-19T03:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maddruid.com\/?p=1815"},"modified":"2009-02-25T23:49:55","modified_gmt":"2009-02-25T15:49:55","slug":"1809-of-anna-schwartz-talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/?p=1815","title":{"rendered":"[1809] Of Anna Schwartz talks"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called the 888-page &#8220;Monetary History&#8221; &#8220;the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history.&#8221; Ms. Schwartz thinks that our central bankers and our Treasury Department are getting it wrong again.<\/p>\n<p>To understand why, one first has to understand the nature of the current &#8220;credit market disturbance,&#8221; as Ms. Schwartz delicately calls it. We now hear almost every day that banks will not lend to each other, or will do so only at punitive interest rates. Credit spreads &#8212; the difference between what it costs the government to borrow and what private-sector borrowers must pay &#8212; are at historic highs.<\/p>\n<p>This is not due to a lack of money available to lend, Ms. Schwartz says, but to a lack of faith in the ability of borrowers to repay their debts. &#8220;The Fed,&#8221; she argues, &#8220;has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible.&#8221; [<a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB122428279231046053.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Bernanke Is Fighting the Last War<\/em><\/a>. Brian M. Carney. The Wall Street Journal. October 18 2008]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called the 888-page &#8220;Monetary History&#8221; &#8220;the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history.&#8221; Ms. Schwartz thinks that our central bankers and our Treasury Department are getting it wrong again. To understand why, one first has to understand the nature of the current &#8220;credit [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[143,129],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-anna-schwartz","tag-business-cycle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2450,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/2450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}