John Cassidy writes in the New Yorker that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen didn’t see fit to once mention asset bubbles in her speech at the Economic Club of New York the other day and that, in itself, is a bit disconcerting.
But what was most striking to me about Yellen’s remarks was that she didn’t even discuss the financial markets and the overriding need to avoid another damaging speculative bubble, like the ones that the American economy experienced in the late nineteen-nineties and mid-two-thousands. Indeed, Yellen didn’t use the B-word at all. Given that her immediate predecessors, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, will be remembered for, among other things, their roles in inflating the bubbles in the stock market and the housing market, that was a pretty remarkable omission. Recent history can’t be avoided, and neither can the task of maintaining financial stability and avoiding boom-bust cycles, particularly in the credit markets. Together with maintaining an adequate level of over-all demand in the economy, which is necessary for investment and job creation to proceed, it is the key challenge that all central banks face. But Yellen didn’t even mention it. Instead, she couched her remarks in terms of the old-fashioned inflation-unemployment trade-off, which is precisely the conceptual framework that encouraged Greenspan and Bernanke to shrug off what was happening in the financial and housing markets.
But what was most striking to me about Yellen’s remarks was that she didn’t even discuss the financial markets and the overriding need to avoid another damaging speculative bubble, like the ones that the American economy experienced in the late nineteen-nineties and mid-two-thousands. Indeed, Yellen didn’t use the B-word at all. Given that her immediate predecessors, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, will be remembered for, among other things, their roles in inflating the bubbles in the stock market and the housing market, that was a pretty remarkable omission.
Recent history can’t be avoided, and neither can the task of maintaining financial stability and avoiding boom-bust cycles, particularly in the credit markets. Together with maintaining an adequate level of over-all demand in the economy, which is necessary for investment and job creation to proceed, it is the key challenge that all central banks face. But Yellen didn’t even mention it. Instead, she couched her remarks in terms of the old-fashioned inflation-unemployment trade-off, which is precisely the conceptual framework that encouraged Greenspan and Bernanke to shrug off what was happening in the financial and housing markets.
It’s hard to believe that Yellen will be any different than her predecessors in spotting a looming crisis be it of the bursting asset bubble variety or something different.
Moreover, when considering that history rarely repeats, but often rhymes as Mark Twain purportedly quipped, the Fed will probably be more attuned to spotting something they’ve already seen (e.g., stock bubble, housing bubble, etc.) rather than the more likely case of something completely different (e.g., currency crisis, sovereign debt crisis, etc.)
