Perry Mehrling: The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort

The author was recently quoted as stating that the United States' Federal Reserve Bank was acting, in fact, as the world's central bank; this is a relatively straight forward notion, and actually rather self evident when you think of the greenback as the world's base currency (in terms of volume and stability and liquidity, and in terms of currency reserves held by sovereign banks). In the Sun Herald, Bradley Keoun and Hugh Son invoked the author this way: “Things would have been worse if they hadn’t lent to foreigners,” said Perry Mehrling, senior fellow at the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at Boston University and author of “The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the Dealer of Last Resort.” “We’re finally getting to understand the role of the Fed in the world.” Fed spreadsheets showed the central bank became the world’s lender of last resort as dollars flowed to European banks as well as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co, among top borrowers from the Term Auction Facility at $45 billion each. Read that Sun Herald piece here. Recently, the author was a guest on Bloomberg Radio; download the podcast of that show here.

The Great Recession in Historical Perspective, Part 1: Introduction from Committee on Global Thought on Vimeo.

Pairing Ron Paul with Paul Krugman - Economics and Politics

Texas congressman Ron Paul has long been a fierce critic of the Federal Reserve. In fact, last year he published a book called End the Fed, calling for an end to the central bank and a return to the gold standard. Now, Paul has been appointed head of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which, among other things, oversees the Federal Reserve. So, does Paul see this as his chance to try to end the Fed? "In a partial sense, but not directly," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "What I'm really asking for is competition, to get rid of the monopoly power of the Fed, because they don't have legitimate power to do what they do."

This snippet's from NPR's All Things Considered. The podcast for this show can be found here. The full All Things Considered story can be found here. Here are some other books that are also by Paul: The Revolution: A Manifesto, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, Liberty Defined: The 50 Urgent Issues That Affect Our Freedom, Pillars of Prosperity. According to ABC News, Paul recently said, "Now that doesn't mean that the first week in January I send over a subpoena for (Fed Chairman Ben) Bernanke and demand that he come over with a pile of papers, I don't think that would be logical." View that full ABC story here. Paul Krugman opposes Ron Paul's ideas. [Funny how they both have "Paul" in their names.] He writes a regular column at The New York Times, and recently, he's said that "[Paleomonetarism] I used that term — it’s probably not original, but who knows? — in a recent post about the increasingly obscure meaning of the money supply. The best example would surely be Ron Paul, who’s now going to have oversight over the Fed. If you read his stuff, it’s very clear: money is a well-defined quantity that the Fed controls, and inflation comes from — indeed is defined as — increases in that quantity." Read that full NYT post here. Here are a few Krugman titles that you can pair Paul with: The Conscience of a Liberal, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (Updated and Expanded), A Country Is Not a Company (Harvard Business Review Classics)

Today: Business News with Adam Shaw from BBC Podcast - Best of Today

Business news with Adam Shaw: Economist Ian Shepherdson analyses the effects of the US Federal Reserve announcement today whether it's going ahead with a second round of quantitative easing. Stockbroker Paul Kavanagh examines why trading was halted yesterday for two hours on one of the London Stock Exchange's key trading platforms, the LSE believes this "may have occurred in suspicious circumstances". Vice President of Booz & Company, Michael Knott talks about the drop in research and development spending among the world's top 1,000 public companies.

Listen to the podcast here, or download the podcast here. You can also stream the file here. See also: Economics of the City (Studies the UK Economy), Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, The Case Against the Fed, http://www.federalreserve.gov/