In one sense the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision today to move its intended Federal Funds rate down to “a target range … of 0 to 1/4 percent” was historic—never, since it began announcing the target rate in the early 1980s, has the Fed gone below 1%. But it’s also something of a nonevent: the [...]
Bernard Madoff appears to have operated a Ponzi scheme, in which money from new investors was used to pay off those who got in earlier. But there are other, perfectly legitimate financial endeavors that share this same basic model. The most obvious is Social Security (and James Pethokoukis has already nominated Madoff for Social Security [...]
