This past week featured an anniversary of sorts.  On June 27, 2005 Barney Frank held court - in congress no less - on the absolute impossibility of there being a housing bubble.  As befits a political power-broker with huge swaths of the mainstream media as little more than playthings in his hand, it is unsurprising that Frank received little in the way of backlash for playing such a

The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee (FOMC) recently announced a significant policy departure from what had been its determination to increase interest rates and to unwind the Federal Reserve's balance sheet.  In September 2008, the Fed's balance sheet was about $800-billion.  The assets on the Fed's balance sheet are the Treasury bonds and other financial assets the Fed holds;

Because of this week's upcoming FOMC meeting, I thought it was appropriate to re-visit an article from about six months ago.  The article was written in the wake of what appeared to be - at the time anyway - the Federal Reserve's determination to 'normalize' monetary policy.  The most obvious manifestations of this normalization would be higher interest rates and a smaller Fed balance

This is a re-print of a blog post that ran one year ago this week.  President Clinton's speech from June 5, 1995 is discussed.  The policies and objectives laid out by President Clinton in this speech played an enormous role in the housing bubble and, by extension, all of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy interventions that came in the wake of the housing bubble's collapse.&nb