The Federal Reserve released its statement from the latest Federal Open Market Committee meeting this past week. Its projections see economic growth reaching 3.8 percent at best over the next three years, hovering between two and three percent per year after that, and finally driving unemployment down to between five and six percent after 2015.

None of that is especially new or encouraging. But on Wednesday, Ryan Avent at The Economist pointed out another number in the report that hints at a more subtle, but possibly more pernicious problem. It’s the federal funds rate, which is the interest rate the Fed charges other banks when it lends them money — thereby guiding interest rates throughout the economy — and which has basically been at zero since the Great Recession:

If recovery proceeds as the Fed anticipates, its interest-rate target will remain at near zero until at least 2015. Perhaps more worrying, the FOMC’s best guess at the appropriate, long-run value of the fed funds rate is about 4 percent. That is strikingly low. In each of the past three recessions the Fed has responded by cutting the fed funds rate more than 4 percentage points. A fed funds rate at that level virtually guarantees that the next downturn will result in a relapse into [zero lower bound] territory.

The Fed has a dual mandate to control inflation and maximize employment, and the federal funds rate is the mechanism by which it does both. It can boost the economy by cutting the rate, or rein in inflation by raising the rate. So there’s an inherent balancing act, and the Fed needs room to go in both directions. That’s why, over the past 40 years, the rate only briefly dipped below the four percent mark, and spent most of the boom-time 90s at over five percent:

There’s an imbalance in the Fed’s policy toolkit, in that it can raise the rate as high as it wants to fight inflation, but it can’t cut it past zero to boost the economy and job growth. That’s the problem of the “zero lower bound” Avent refers to. If the rate doesn’t get above four percent, but the Fed needs to cut at least that much to boost the economy, then there’s just not going to be much room to maneuver when the next recession rolls around.

Some economists such as Paul Krugman argue that when monetary policy hits the zero lower bound, fiscal policy (i.e. stimulus spending) becomes the primary tool to help the economy. But others, like Scott Sumner, argue that quantitative easing and other forms of unconventional monetary policy can still work just as well if not better than fiscal policy when the federal funds rate is at zero.

Unfortunately, Republicans are vociferously opposed to both policies. They’ve relentlessly pressured the Fed and Chairman Ben Bernanke to end quantitative easing or even hike the federal funds rate, incessantly warning of runaway inflation that never materializes. There’s also been no real opposing pressure from Democrats or progressives to prioritize job growth. The Fed’s latest form of quantitative easing has been a big step in the right direction, but several members of the governing committee or so skittish they’ve proposed ending it as early as this year.

On top of that, the way the Fed is designed and governed saddles it with additional biases towards cutting inflation over pushing up employment. As an institution, it’s more attuned to the concerns of the financial industry, business owners and the wealthy. Those groups are generally indifferent to sluggish economic growth — they’re the last to lose their homes or livelihoods if the economy implodes or unemployment spikes — but they all have a vested interest in low and stable inflation.

So not surprisingly, for the last twenty years or more, low and stable inflation is exactly what the country got. Even after the Great Recession, the Fed consistently hit its two percent inflation target, even as its counterbalancing mandate to boost employment was essentially ignored:

Arguably, the fundamental problem is the Fed did too good a job at reining in inflation.

Inflation is the natural response of an economy to robust growth, as rising wages put upward pressure on other prices. A Fed devoted to controlling inflation above all else will inevitably also weigh down jobs and wages for working Americans. “Morning in America,” the economic boom of the Reagan years, was accompanied by four percent inflation on average — twice the level we’re seeing now.

The last few decades of low inflation also came alongside stagnating median wages, and a new form of “jobless” recovery that brings back economic growth, but not the job growth of previous post-war recoveries. The result has been a self-reinforcing downward spiral, as stalled wages bring more inequality and less inflation, eliminating the need for a higher federal funds rate and ultimately leaving the Fed with ever less ammunition to boost employment with each successive recession.

Certainly, the Fed’s preference for exceedingly low inflation is not the whole cause behind slow wage growth and rampant inequality. But it’s most likely a big part.

Amid rising concerns about large banks from senators, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Tuesday that “too big to fail” banks still pose a major risk to the American economy. Massachusetts Sen. Elizatbeth Warren (D) grilled Bernanke over the persistence of Too Big To Fail institutions during a Senate hearing last week, and at a press conference yesterday, Bernanke made it clear that he agrees with Warren that such banks are still a “major issue” that need to be addressed:

BERNANKE: I certainly never meant to say to Senator Warren, and I share her concern about Too Big To Fail, it’s a major issue. I never meant to imply that the problem was solved and gone. It is not solved and gone. … I hope that we’ll make progress against Too Big To Fail, because I agree with her 100 percent that it’s a real problem and needs to be addressed if at all possible.

Warren’s reputation as a critic of Wall Street followed her to the Senate, where she has questioned regulators over bank prosecutions and whether large financial institutions were “too big for trial.” But Warren isn’t alone: Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) are prepping legislation to reduce the size of large banks, and Brown and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) have also pressed regulators and the Justice Dept. over the lack of prosecutions that creates the perception that banks have a “get out of jail free” card.

The largest banks, as this chart Brown displayed on the Senate floor last month shows, have only grown larger since the financial crisis:

The key focus for Bernanke right now, he said, was ensuring that rules included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and other international guidelines meant to reduce the risk of Too Big To Fail banks were instituted properly.

Unemployment is likely to remain above 6 percent for at least three more years, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said during testimony in front of the House Financial Services Committee today. Responding to questions from Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Bernanke said a “reasonable guess” for when unemployment will finally come down to 6 percent is 2016:

FITZPATRICK: The Fed has indicated it believes long-term unemployment rates will settle at around 5.2 percent or 6 percent.

BERNANKE: That’s our best guess.

FITZPATRICK: An understanding I heard your testimony earlier about predicting the future. When would you say we might get to around 6 percent? And also, the American people, they believe natural unemployment is actually much lower than that given what we experienced in the 1990s. Maybe your suggestion as to how we address that expectation.

BERNANKE: Again, it’s hard to predict. But a reasonable guess for 6 percent would be around 2016.

Watch it:

That unemployment remains high and will continue to do so for at least three more years would seem yet another argument against sequestration, the automatic budget cuts that will begin taking effect Friday. Indeed, Bernanke was outspoken in his opposition to further fiscal contraction during his testimony, repeatedly saying the budget cuts could damage the economic recovery and that the Federal Reserve, which has been acting to stimulate the economy through monetary means for months, could use help from Congress.

Instead of offering that help, Congress remains focused on deficit reduction, even as evidence mounts that the only spending problem America has right now is that the government isn’t spending enough. But Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to further stimulate the economy, choosing instead to push spending cuts that have held back the recovery. The looming round of cuts will only make that worse: the Congressional Budget Office projects that sequestration will knock 0.6 percentage point off economic growth while resulting in the loss of more than 700,000 jobs.

Budget cuts under the so-called “sequester” will go into effect on Friday. Independent estimates shows that the cuts will cost anywhere from 700,000 to 750,000 jobs. And the end result may be very little deficit reduction as well, as a more depressed economy will not produce as much in the way of revenue, as economist Adam Hersh explained.

During a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke patiently tried to explain this to Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), who wasn’t having it:

DUFFY: Instead of encouraging responsibility, you come in and say “listen to cut 2 percent of our budget, you can’t do it. It’s going to have a great impact on our economy.” Mr. Chairman that doesn’t make sense to me.

BERNANKE: Well, I think most economists, including the CBO, would say this will cost a lot of jobs in the short run. And you can achieve the same results with longer-term programs. [...]

DUFFY: So then are you here telling us if we cut $85 billion in a more reflective way — in the bad spending that I just referenced — you would support it? It’s a good idea if we’re not doing it by way of the sequester, but we had a little more reflective analysis on the $85 billion.

BERNANKE: It would be better.

DUFFY: So is it better or you agree with us that we should actually reduce spending?

BERNANKE: I’m still concerned about the short-term impact on jobs. And you don’t get as much benefit as you think, because if you slow the economy that hurts your revenues and that means your deficit reduction is not as big as you think it is.

Watch:

For evidence of what Bernanke is talking about, one needs to look no further than Europe, where austerity — rather than sparking a recovery — has led to weak growth, high unemployment, and yes, more debt. In fact, the EU’s debt “was barely changed at 90 percent of gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012 compared with 89.9 percent for three months earlier…It was up from 86.8 percent of GDP a year earlier,” even after the continent embraced deep spending cuts and reforms.

During a Senate Banking committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) grilled Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on whether Wall Street banks should have to pay back U.S. taxpayers for the implicit funding advantage those banks receive by virtue of being viewed as “too big to fail.” According to a Bloomberg News study, big banks are essentially subsidized by about $83 billion per year because investors anticipate that those banks will be saved by the government if they get in trouble.

“These big financial institutions are getting cheaper borrowing to the tune of $83 billion in a single year simply because people believe the government would step up and bail them out. If they are getting it, why shouldn’t they pay for it?” asked Warren:

WARREN: So I understand that we’re all trying to get to the end of “too big to fail.” But my question, Mr. chairman, is until we do, should those biggest financial institutions be repaying the American taxpayer that $83 billion subsidy that they are getting?…It is working like an insurance policy. Ordinary folks pay for homeowners insurance. Ordinary folks pay for car insurance. And these big financial institutions are getting cheaper borrowing to the tune of $83 billion in a single year simply because people believe that the government would step in and bail them out. And I’m just saying, if they are getting it, why shouldn’t they pay for it?

BERNANKE: I think we should get rid of it.

Watch it:

As Bloomberg found, the biggest banks wouldn’t even be profitable without the expectation that they would be rescued by the government. “The banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry — with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy — would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders,” Bloomberg noted.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had a succinct message today for lawmakers looking to monkey around with the debt ceiling — don’t do it. He also blew a hole in the myth that the debt ceiling has something to do with future spending, as opposed to spending already authorized by Congress:

Likening Congress to a family arguing that it can improve its credit rating by deciding not to pay its credit card bill, Bernanke said that raising the legal borrowing limit was not the same as authorizing new government spending.

“It’s very, very important that Congress takes the necessary action to raise the debt ceiling to avoid a situation where our government doesn’t pay its bills,” he told an event sponsored by the University of Michigan.

House Republicans have threatened to take the debt ceiling hostage in order to secure cuts to entitlements and other domestic spending. During a press conference today, President Obama excoriated Republicans for trying to take use the debt ceiling as leverage. “They will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy,” he said. “The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip.”

Bernanke also revealed today that he reads blogs. “Blogs have become pretty important source of intellectual exchange,” he said.

The Federal Reserve today announced a new approach to monetary policy, announcing that it would keep interest rates low until unemployment hits 6.5 percent (or inflation exceeds 2.5 percent). This is the first time the Fed has explicitly laid out an unemployment target.

During a press conference today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explained that the Fed took its latest step due to the “enormous waste of human and economic potential” that is resulting from persistently high unemployment:

It’s been about three and a half years since the economic recovery began. The economy continues to expand at a moderate pace. Unfortunately, however, unemployment remains high. About 5 million people, more than 40 percent of the unemployed, have been without a job for six months or more and millions more who said they would like full-time work have been able to find only part time employment or have stopped looking entirely. The conditions now prevailing in the job market represent an enormous waste of human and economic potential.

A return to broad-based prosperity will require sustained improvement in the job market which in turn requires stronger economic growth. Meanwhile, apart from some temporarily fluctuations, largely reflected swings in energy prices, inflation has remained tame and appears likely to run at or below the Federal Market Committee’s 2 percent objective in coming quarters and over the longer term. Against a macro economic backdrop that includes both high unemployment and subdued inflation, the FOMC will maintain its highly accommodative policy.

Watch it:

As Tim Duy explained at Fed Watch, “The Fed delivered an early Christmas present to the economy by acting above expectations with not only a one-for-one conversion of Operation Twist to outright asset purchases, more than doubling the pace of balance sheet expansion, but also shifting the communications strategy to thresholds. The latter ties policy explicitly to outcomes rather than dates, which I think is the appropriate direction for policy.” Several members of the Federal Reserve board have been pushing for the central bank to adopt an explicit unemployment target.

Bernanke is also right to worry about the plight of the long-term unemployed. Due to an expiration of extended federal unemployment insurance, only one-quarter of the nation’s unemployed will have access to unemployment benefits come January.

Discriminatory lending policies made the housing crisis worse for African-American and Latino borrowers, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a financial summit held Thursday in Atlanta. The housing crisis and economic slump followed the “unfortunate pattern” of “disproportionately affecting” minorities, Bernanke said, pointing to the fact that black home ownership rates have fallen five percentage points in the last eight years, compared to just a two percent drop for the general population.

Two major discriminatory actions made the crisis worse for minorities, Bernanke said:

“One is redlining, in which mortgage lenders discriminate against minority neighborhoods, and the other is pricing discrimination, in which lenders charge minorities higher loan prices than they would to comparable nonminority borrowers,” Bernanke said.

“We remain committed to vigorous enforcement of the nation’s fair lending laws,” he added.

Studies have shown that blacks and Latinos were twice as likely to have been affected by the housing crisis as white borrowers, largely for the reasons Bernanke outlined. Many minority borrowers were pushed into riskier, more expensive subprime loans even though they qualified for lower-interest prime mortgages. Subprime loans, which can add $100,000 to the price over the life of the mortgage, were given to 30.9 percent of Latinos and 41.5 percent of blacks, compared to just 17.8 percent of whites.

Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, paid $175 million to settle discriminatory lending charges in July, and other mortgage companies have been fined and ordered to pay settlements to homeowners they discriminated against.

Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced his institution would launch a third round of quantitative easing — the monetary stimulus the Fed has used intermittently to boost the economy since 2008 — in an effort to finally fulfill the “reduce unemployment” half of the Fed’s dual mandate. In response, Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan denounced the move as “sugar high economics” and repeated to the Christian Broadcasting Network his assertion that “the costs outweigh the benefits” of QE:

I’m not a fan of QE3. I wasn’t a fan of QE2 either. I think in the long run it will do more harm than good. But what this is is it’s the Federal Reserve and the monetary policy trying to bail out the fact that we have terrible leadership on fiscal policy from President Obama…

I fear that it undermines the ultimate credibility of our currency, of our money and you need to have sound money. It’s a necessary pre-condition for economic growth. We have loose money already so it’s not a question of having too tight of a monetary policy. We have exceptionally loose monetary policy… This kind of easing hurts savers, questions the credibility of our currency, and I think ultimately the costs outweigh the benefits.

Watch it:

ThinkProgress already reported on the problems in Paul Ryan’s cost/benefit analysis: Inflation remains at a near-historic low of 2 percent — far below the 12 percent inflation of the 1970s — while unemployment is still at 8 percent. The Fed’s interest rates have nowhere to go but up, meaning inflation could be easily reined in if it began to dangerously rise.

Bernanke himself has already estimated the initial rounds of QE created as many as 2 million jobs. And the “savers” that Ryan says could be hurt are in fact a very narrow group, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research: “Realistically there are not a lot of people who both have substantial savings (enough that the interest makes up a big share of their income) and who kept it exclusively in short-term assets… The winners from a policy to boost growth through lower interest rates vastly outnumber the losers.”

Ryan’s claim that monetary policy is already “exceptionally loose” is also questionable. Milton Friedman, the 20th century economist beloved by many conservatives, argued that interest rates are actually poor indicators of monetary policy. Better indicators are inflation and nominal GDP growth, a view with which Bernanke has concurred. Both the inflation and NGDP growth trends suggest monetary policy is actually too tight.

Ryan is certainly right that monetary stimulus is a second-best option for boosting the economy after better fiscal policy. But the international and domestic evidence shows that Ryan’s preferred fiscal policy would drive the economy further into the ground. Meanwhile, the Republicans’ control of the House and their filibuster in the Senate have enabled them to torpedo fiscal policy that would actually help.