Tyrone runs monetary policy

Tyrone barely knows enough technical macroeconomics to bark out an opinion, much less defend it or specify coherent policies.  Nonetheless he suggested that I pass the following along to Ben Bernanke:

It seems there is not enough lending.  People would lend more if interest rates were higher or at least I think I learned that in Econ 101.  So let’s raise interest rates.  I’ve also heard we have banks buying T-Bills and the Fed and government buying claims to real businesses.  Can that be true?  Isn’t that backwards?  If they aren’t working properly, why not just recall all the T-Bills? (Didn’t General Motors do something like this once?  It seemed to work out for them.)  Then the banks would have to invest somewhere.  Give a bonus to any bank that does something real.  Let the others rot.  (Tyrone then called up Trudie, who told him: "Have the Fed announce it will go massively short in the T-Bill futures market, sometime in the near future and without further warning.  That would scare people out of government assets.")

What about that guy who set up the phony investment company?  Can the Treasury make a new one of those, only bigger?  He took money away from people and gave it to charities and the needy and the arts and higher education.  That sounds like stimulus so why are we sending him to jail?  Wasn’t he ahead of the curve?

Why don’t we increase the tax deduction for donations to any charity which manages to expand its spending on overhead or is the word infrastructure?  For every dollar given, let the donor deduct more than a dollar from taxes.  That’ll get the money out of the banks of those rich people and into the hands of real Americans.  Still, it’s not as good as the phony guy who’s been doing this for twenty years.  I guess we’re all trying to catch up to him.  It seems he had help from his family but Bernanke does not.  Makes all the difference.

Tyrone tells me, by the way, that soon he will try his hand at a restaurant review.  It can’t be any worse than this.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed