by Calculated Risk on 8/14/2008 01:03:00 PM

Dr. David Altig, now director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, returns to blogging. Welcome back!

From Macroblog: What the Fed did during macroblog's vacation

To state the very obvious, it has been quite an eventful twelve months since I last committed fingers to laptop. I might well have titled this post "Four Fed programs that did not exist one year ago." Over the four months from December to March, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, introduced an alphabet soup of new lending programs to address acute stress in financial markets, some of which required the invocation of emergency powers based on "unusual and exigent circumstances."

I know that in some quarters—maybe the one where you reside—all this activity had a certain frenetic, whack-a-mole feel to it. But I think it appropriate to view the Fed's actions over this period as what I believe them to be: A measured and logical sequence of steps to address very specific liquidity distress in financial markets.

Much more at the link.

On a personal note, when I first started blogging (a long time ago!), Dr. Altig gave Calculated Risk some wider exposure, especially on housing. Altig wasn't as pessimistic as me at the time, but he was very open to the possibilities of a major housing correction. Thanks Dave and Welcome Back!