Is there an Eph at The Economist? This is the second quote from a Williams economics professor to appear in the last few weeks.

The Fed does face some constraints. One is legal: like most central banks, it is generally prohibited from unsecured lending. It gets around this, in part, by lending to its own off-balance-sheet vehicle, which holds the unsecured commercial paper. Another is political: Americans may object to their central bank displacing private lenders. But Mr Mishkin says the political risks of doing too little and letting the economy slide are far greater. A final constraint, notes Kenneth Kuttner, an economist at Williams College, is that the Fed could in theory suffer loan losses so great that it needs recapitalisation, as central banks in Chile, Hungary and the Philippines have in the past. Fears of such losses were one reason why the BoJ did not purchase much private-sector debt earlier in this decade. In 2003 Mr Bernanke, then a Fed governor, argued that such concerns were misplaced because, unlike a commercial bank, a central bank cannot go bankrupt.

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