One of my goals when launching this blog in 2011 was to revive interest in the important, but unfortunately neglected and largely forgotten, contributions to monetary and macroeconomic theory of Ralph Hawtrey. Two important books published within the last year have focused attention on Ralph Hawtrey: The Federal Reserve: A New History by Robert Hetzel, […]
Ralph Hawtrey, Part 1: An Overview of his Career
Ralph Hawtrey, Part 1: An Overview of his Career
06 Nov 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic history, fiscal policy, great depression, history of economic thought, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment
*GOAT* on Friedrich A. Hayek and his delusions
31 Oct 2023 Leave a comment
in Austrian economics, business cycles, history of economic thought, macroeconomics, monetary economics
When writing GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does It Matter? I vowed I would write the whole truth. Not just that I agreed with everything I wrote (the case with every book), but I that I would relate all that I was thinking. Here is one part of the […]
*GOAT* on Friedrich A. Hayek and his delusions
Finding external balance
26 Oct 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic growth, fiscal policy, international economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics
That was the title of a ten page piece published last week by the ANZ economics team (chief economist Sharon Zollner and one of her offsiders, who appears to be a temporary secondee from the Reserve Bank). You can find a link to the paper here. The gist is captured in the paper’s summary I […]
Finding external balance
What should be done about the Reserve Bank?
19 Oct 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, inflation targeting, macroeconomics, monetary economics, politics - New Zealand, Public Choice Tags: monetary policy
Monday’s post was on the important place effective accountability must have when government agencies are given great discretionary power which – as is in the nature of any human institutions – they will at times exercise poorly. My particular focus is on the Reserve Bank, both because it is what I know best, because it […]
What should be done about the Reserve Bank?
Heterogeneous Agent Fiscal Theory
14 Oct 2023 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, fiscal policy, macroeconomics, monetary economics
Today, I’ll add an entry to my occasional reviews of interesting academic papers. The paper: “Price Level and Inflation Dynamics in Heterogeneous Agent Economies,” by Greg Kaplan, Georgios Nikolakoudis and Gianluca Violante. One of the many reasons I am excited about this paper is that it unites fiscal theory of the price level with heterogeneous agent…
Heterogeneous Agent Fiscal Theory
John Cochrane — Is It Getting Hot in Here?
28 Sep 2023 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, economic history, fiscal policy, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment
Blackballing academics for the Monetary Policy Committee?
09 Sep 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, macroeconomics, monetary economics Tags: monetary policy
A few months ago, RBNZ and Treasury made some pretty extraordinary claims about the appointment process for external members of the Monetary Policy Committee. Treasury had, in notes released under OIA, said that academic economists with an ongoing research interest in the area were considered conflicted for the MPC.Michael Reddell’s written a lot more on it…
Blackballing academics for the Monetary Policy Committee?
These wsves are an under-rated cause of business cycles
31 Aug 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, history of economic thought, macroeconomics Tags: creative destruction
But we haven’t had a three year negative output gap
29 Aug 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, macroeconomics, monetary economics
One of the great things about being a prominent organisation that releases complex material to select media under embargo is that you can get uncontested coverage in the first (and probably only) news cycle. Adrian Orr will have been glad of that when it came to the embargoed release yesterday (the public only got to […]
But we haven’t had a three year negative output gap
Charles Calomiris-“Thinking Historically about Banking Crises and Bailouts”
16 Aug 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic history, macroeconomics, monetary economics Tags: economics of banking
Bob Lucas on Growth, Poverty and Business Cycles 2/5/2007
19 May 2023 Leave a comment
in business cycles, comparative institutional analysis, development economics, economic history, economics of education, growth disasters, growth miracles, history of economic thought, human capital, labour economics, law and economics, macroeconomics, Milton Friedman, monetarism, monetary economics, Robert E. Lucas, unemployment Tags: monetary policy
Dropping Money from Helicopters: John Cochrane on Inflation
01 Mar 2023 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, comparative institutional analysis, development economics, economic growth, economic history, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, environmental economics, financial economics, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, growth miracles, history of economic thought, inflation targeting, macroeconomics, Milton Friedman, monetarism, monetary economics, public economics
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