Central bankers necessarily spend a great deal of time studying economic and market data that they believe to be forward-looking indicators of the economy’s health.  One such is the so-called “LIB…

The Fed has a dual mandate to pursue price stability and maximum employment.  How should these be defined?  In January, the Fed set itself a long-run inflation target of 2%, while in June the midp…

The so-called Taylor Rule in monetary policy suggests how the Federal Reserve should adjust interest rates based on movements in inflation and economic output.  Although the Fed has never explicit…

Imagine life insurance contracts that wouldn’t pay off if officials declared heart attacks to be “voluntary.” Welcome to the world of sovereign credit default swaps, or CDSs.  When the Greek debt d…

This post is by Brad Setser and Paul Swartz of the Council on Foreign Relations. No doubt today’s GDP release will attract the lion’s share of the econoblogosphere’s attention. But sometimes it …