Fed Chair Janet Yellen & Five Easy Pieces: No Toast? Hold the chicken.

Procrustes Stretched

And you say, "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"
Dec 1, 2008
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Positively 4th Street
Fed Chair Janet Yellen & Five Easy Pieces: No Toast? Hold the chicken.

Five Easy Pieces: [Bobby wants plain toast, which isn't on the menu]

Bobby: I'd like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.

Waitress:
A #2, chicken salad sand. Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise, and a cup of coffee. Anything else?

Bobby:
Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.

Waitress:
You want me to hold the chicken, huh?

Bobby:
I want you to hold it between your knees.


Five Easy Pieces (1970) - IMDb
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PDF: Janet Yellen and Jim Adamschallenged their department head at Harvard University over the issue of monopoly pricing.

In Time Magazine's January 20, 2014 issue, Rana Foroohar has an article on this. In it the co-authored paper is said to have been inspired from a scene in the movie Five Easy Pieces. The paper (see pdf link above) sheds "light on why companies try to bundle services instead of selling them separately, and the results helped shape the telecommunications industry."

Adams says "Janet has the temperament of a real scholar. She's not one of those economists for whom believing is seeing...She's open to argument. She collects information patiently and unbiasedly. So when she's ready to make a call, she doesn't have to rely on intellectual bombast or intimidation." -- (Now that's a real liberal. Not a Lawrence Summers.) -- She was a teaching assistant to legendary Keynesian James Tobin where her class notes became a template for a macroeconomics course. Yellen and this last fact are praised by conservative economist Ken Rogoff.

When the spin/debate/battle/drama over who would replace Bernanke at the Fed was itself over, when it looked like Obama would select Summers, Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher (not an philosophical/ideological soul mate of Yellen) said of Yellen "She was steady and evenhanded, and she didn't overreact. It's exactly what you want in a Fed leader."


Finally, somebody who doesn't believe in the voodoo economics model of invisible hands and unregulated markets at the expense of the societies and people markets are meant to serve.

Rational, sane people know markets aren't nearly as efficient as the free marketeers with their smoke, mirrors, and bombast would have us believe.

dD
:cool:
Dante
 
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Glad that sermon is over.

Since nobody really knows what a free market looks like....it would only seem rational that people are going to argue over just what kind of constraints (or how much) will be put on a particular market.

When it comes to economies like ours....well, no one has gotten it done yet (and Obama isn't doing any better).

One question for the New Year that is certain to come up once every six weeks will be the Fed’s Open Market Committee, and specifically, whether there will be more tapering of the central bank’s purchase of $900 billion of government and mortgage bonds.
To date, the Fed’s money printing has poured more than $3 trillion worth of new securities onto its balance sheet since August 2007 when the financial crisis started. Today, it stands at more than $4 trillion total.
In testimony in November, Yellen suggested that she would not remove the near-trillion dollar a year bank subsidy too soon given the fragile nature of the economic recovery, persistently high unemployment and below-Fed-target inflation.
Think about what this means.
The stagnant growth of the past five years is now the excuse to continue the same policies that failed to ignite the economy. It is this circular logic that is likely to result in more stagnant growth and calls for more fiscal and monetary stimulus from the government.
The slightest hiccup, whether it’s trouble in Europe or emerging markets or municipal bonds here in the U.S. or even the continued deterioration of labor market conditions will be enough to keep emergency quantitative easing policies in place throughout all of 2014 and likely beyond.


Read more at NetRightDaily.com: NetRight Daily» Will Janet Yellen stop printing $900 billion a year in 2014?
 
But that is the public Janet Yellen. Disciplined, determined, and brilliant, Yellen is also the product of an old progressive tradition of activist, pro-government economics. Above all, according to colleagues, she takes the nation's worst problems, especially unemployment, as a deeply personal challenge. Yellen, who was confirmed Monday night, represents a strain of interventionist thinking that has not found expression at such a high level in Washington in decades—at least since Ronald Reagan and his Milton Friedman-inspired attempt to shrink the size of government.

How Janet Yellen's Agenda Could Transform Washington - NationalJournal.com

Wonderful ! Just what we need.
 
Since nobody really knows what a free market looks like....it would only seem rational that people are going to argue over just what kind of constraints (or how much) will be put on a particular market.

When it comes to economies like ours....well, no one has gotten it done yet (and Obama isn't doing any better).

You could argue the counterfactual over statements like this too:

Think about what this means.
The stagnant growth of the past five years is now the excuse to continue the same policies that failed to ignite the economy.

Did they fail to ignite the economy? Maybe the economy would have just completely collapsed into a recessionary/deflationary/depressionary spiral and the Fed's actions were only able to keep us barely afloat. Think of how bad the recession would have been had the Fed not intervened. If the non-Fed world would have resulted in -70% economic collapse, then the Fed's performance in our Fed-world is a little over +70% economic growth!

The problem is that this isn't an experiement. There is no control variable, no repitition, no random sample from a population... There is no way to know what the counterfactual world would have looked like. There is no way to know what a libertarian utopia would look like. There is no way to know what the world would have looked like if the Fed hadn't intervened. All we have are models and estimates that may or may not be accurate or useful.
 
Since nobody really knows what a free market looks like....it would only seem rational that people are going to argue over just what kind of constraints (or how much) will be put on a particular market.

When it comes to economies like ours....well, no one has gotten it done yet (and Obama isn't doing any better).

You could argue the counterfactual over statements like this too:

Think about what this means.
The stagnant growth of the past five years is now the excuse to continue the same policies that failed to ignite the economy.

Did they fail to ignite the economy? Maybe the economy would have just completely collapsed into a recessionary/deflationary/depressionary spiral and the Fed's actions were only able to keep us barely afloat. Think of how bad the recession would have been had the Fed not intervened. If the non-Fed world would have resulted in -70% economic collapse, then the Fed's performance in our Fed-world is a little over +70% economic growth!

The problem is that this isn't an experiement. There is no control variable, no repitition, no random sample from a population... There is no way to know what the counterfactual world would have looked like. There is no way to know what a libertarian utopia would look like. There is no way to know what the world would have looked like if the Fed hadn't intervened. All we have are models and estimates that may or may not be accurate or useful.

I agree.....
 

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