Yield Stories by Krugman

Maybe there’s some truth to some of these stories. But surely the dominant story is very simple: it reflects market perceptions that the economy is going to be depressed for a long time. As I’ve argued before, you really want to look at Japan, which exhibited this syndrome at a time when there was clearly no shortage of safe assets and few were talking about disaster...

SF Fed's John Williams Gets It on Monetary Policy by Yglesias

But since the Federal Reserve isn't an investor trying to make money, but rather a policy-making institution trying to achieve some policy goals, it needs to articulate those goals.

That's why it's exciting to read San Francisco Federal Reserve President John Williams calling for what's being termed "open-ended QE."

We should probably just retire the term "QE" at this point. What he's talking about is going back to doing asset purchases, but doing them in potentially unlimited quantities in order to meet a goal. You say, for example, "we're going to spend BLAH BLAH a week to try to get inflation expectations up to YADDA YADDA and if after five weeks we're not there yet we're going to start spending DOUBLE BLAH BLAH." This is not my idea of what an asbolutely optimal policy agenda looks like, but it would work much better than trying to decide how much to buy in advance....