Are deviations from full employment a social problem? Obviously.

After adjusting for inflation, the average income of the top 5% of households grew by 38% from 1989 to 2013. …By comparison, the average real income of the other 95% of households grew less than 10%.

Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.

We do not interpret bitcoin's popularity as having a relationship with the public's view of the Federal Reserve's conduct of monetary policy

[A] major source of wealth for many families is financial assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and private pensions. ...the wealthiest 5 percent of households held nearly two-thirds of all such assets in 2013

The bottom line for housing is that the concerns we used to hear about the possibility of a devastating collapse—one that might be big enough to cause a recession in the U.S. economy—while not fully allayed have diminished. Moreover, while the future for housing activity remains uncertain, I think there is a reasonable chance that housing is in the process of stabilizing, which would mean that it would put a considerably smaller drag on the economy going forward.

We need to increase the transparency of shadow banking markets so that authorities can monitor for signs of excessive leverage and unstable maturity transformation outside regulated banks.