James Bullard is worried about “medium term” inflation and agitating for a subtle change in monetary policy, he said this morning at Commerce Bank’s annual economic breakfast. But Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, saved his strongest…

At last week’s St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank economic policy conference, economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde presented an interesting challenge to conventional Federal Reserve history. Conventional wisdom holds that the Fed chairmen of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Arthur Burns and G.…

The economy is already recovering from recession and will get stronger in 2010, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said today in St. Louis. The recovery is being driven by a slowing of inventory liquidation and an improvement in home building, he said.

However, like…

In London, “mind the gap” announcements remind subway travelers to be careful of the space between the train door and the platform. James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, reminded economists Sunday to be careful about how they…

James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, is worried about falling into a “trap” in which deflation remains a danger and interest rates remain low for an extended period of time. To avoid that trap, he said…

When the Federal Reserve released its Beige Book economic survey a couple of weeks ago, the St. Louis region was the only area that didn’t report stable or improving economic conditions. It should be no surprise, then, that when the St.…

The late Washington University economist Hyman Minsky was never considered a mainstream economist. These days, though, mainstream economists are giving Minsky’s insights plenty of thought. A long piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe explains the recent fascination with Minsky, who is…

Fed officials such as James Bullard, Thomas Hoenig and Gary Stern have spoken eloquently about the need to address banking’s too-big-to-fail problem, but in the real world, bank regulators haven’t done much about it. In fact, the Washington Post reported last week,…

James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, says that the U.S. economy “is stabilizing” and will show positive growth for the second half of this year. He commented on the outlook during a speech yesterday in…

World trade is likely to fall this year by the largest amount since World War II, Cletus Coughlin writes in a short essay on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website. He cites a couple of obvious reasons — the…