big picture

The Fed Doesn’t Care About Unemployment

You can always count on Matt Yglesias to find the big-picture moral in a wonky economics debate. Today, the Slate columnist tackles the back-and-forth between Bloomberg News and the Federal Reserve. Bloomberg unearthed evidence that the Fed secretly engaged in emergency lending programs in 2008 and then tried to conceal the details from the public; the Fed takes issue with the story’s framing. The larger point: “What Bloomberg is teaching us here is that there’s lots and lots of stuff that a creative and determined central bank can and will do to resolve problems that it takes seriously.” Unfortunately, the Fed has consistently shown it takes bank woes much more seriously than unemployment.