By Matt Benjamin Economists absolutely love to make forecasts. It’s what they do. And it doesn’t matter if the supporting data for their projections is paper-thin (it often is). It’s when they decline to make a forecast that I get worried. And it has me wondering: how bad will the 2020 recession be?
On Sunday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced a nearly unprecedented “monetary bazooka.” The central bank cut rates to approximately zero. And relaunched a major bond-purchasing program known as quantitative easing.
Fed watchers like me were expecting such extreme measures from Powell & Co., given the damage the pandemic is doing to …read more
