Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
13 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of information, economics of regulation, financial economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, politics - USA Tags: banking panics
One year ago in March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank melted down, quickly followed by similar meltdowns at Signature Bank and First Republic Bank. Measured by the nominal size of bank assets, these were three of the biggest four US bank failures in history. (The failure of Washington Mutual Bank in 2008 remains the largest.) Was…
One Year Since the Meltdown at Silicon Valley Bank: Commercial Real Estate and Ongoing Threats
01 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, business cycles, fiscal policy, history of economic thought, job search and matching, macroeconomics, monetary economics Tags: real business cycle theory
Demand shocks as technology shocks: We provide a macroeconomic theory where demand for goods has a productive role. A search friction prevents perfect matching between producers and potential customers. Larger demand induces more search, which in turn increases GDP and measured TFP. We embed the product-market friction in a standard neoclassical model and estimate it […]
This kind of macro theory is underrated
25 Feb 2024 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic history, history of economic thought, macroeconomics, Milton Friedman, monetary economics Tags: monetary policy, wage and price controls
Reading the new Nicholas Wapshott book and also Krugman’s review (NYT) of it, it all seemed a little too rosy to me. So I went back and took a look at Paul Samuelson the macroeconomist. I regret that I cannot report any good news, in fact Samuelson was downright poor — you might say awful […]
How good was Paul Samuelson’s macroeconomics?
12 Feb 2024 Leave a comment
in business cycles, econometerics, economic history, history of economic thought, macroeconomics, monetary economics
Nobel Laureate T. C. Koopmans wrote one of the most famous economics articles of the twentieth century, “Measurement Without Theory,” a devastating review of an important, and in many ways useful and meritorious, study of business cycles by two of the fathers of empirical business-cycles research, Arthur F. Burns and Wesley C. Mitchell, Measuring Business […]
T. C. Koopmans Demolishes the Phillips Curve as a Guide to Policy
08 Feb 2024 Leave a comment
in business cycles, econometerics, economic growth, inflation targeting, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment Tags: monetary policy
Standard models watched by economists at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere suggest that rates should now be lowerBy Justin Lahart of The WSJ. Excerpt:”So where should rates be? There has been a lot of focus recently on the long-term neutral rate—the just-right level of rates for when inflation is at the Fed’s 2% target, and…
What’s the Right Interest Rate for the Fed Anyway?
08 Feb 2024 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, econometerics, economic growth, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, fiscal policy, inflation targeting, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, politics - New Zealand, Public Choice, unemployment Tags: monetary policy
I’ve been rather tied up with other stuff for the last few weeks (including here) which is why I’ve not previously gotten round to writing about the first piece of monetary policy communications from our Reserve Bank this year. That was the “speech” by the Bank’s chief economist (and MPC) member Paul Conway given to […]
The Conway speech
03 Feb 2024 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, currency unions, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, Euro crisis, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, inflation targeting, macroeconomics, monetary economics, Public Choice Tags: Euro
The euro technically started in 1999, when the 11 founding European members of the currency agreed to keep their exchange rates fixed and to hand over monetary policy to the European Central Bank. The euro then became the actual currency that people and firms used in 2002. I confess that, back in the early 1990s,…
The Euro at 25
22 Jan 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, budget deficits, comparative institutional analysis, development economics, economic growth, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of regulation, fiscal policy, growth disasters, income redistribution, labour economics, liberalism, libertarianism, macroeconomics, Marxist economics, monetary economics, Public Choice, public economics, rentseeking Tags: Argentina
I give him a 30-40% chance, which is perhaps generous because I am rooting for him. Bryan Caplan, who is more optimistic, offers some analysis and estimates that Milei needs to close a fiscal gap of about five percent of gdp. I have two major worries. First, if Milei approaches fiscal success, the opposing parties […]
Will Milei succeed in Argentina?
19 Jan 2024 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economics of bureaucracy, macroeconomics, monetary economics, politics - New Zealand, Public Choice Tags: monetary policy
Regular readers will recall that I have, intermittently, been on the trail of the approach taken to the selection (and rejection) of external MPC members when the current crop were first appointed in 2019. I have been pursuing the matter since a highly credible person who was interested in being considered for appointment told me that […]
Avoiding scrutiny
17 Jan 2024 Leave a comment
in business cycles, econometerics, economic history, history of economic thought, job search and matching, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment
Yusuf Mercan, Benjamin Schoefer, and Petr Sedláček, newly published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. I best liked this excerpt from p.2, noting that “DMP” refers to the Nobel-winning Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment: This congestion mechanism improves the business cycle performance of the DMP model considerably. It raises the volatility of labor market tightness tenfold, […]
A congestion theory of unemployment fluctuations
15 Jan 2024 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, economic history, fiscal policy, great depression, history of economic thought, macroeconomics, monetary economics
Clara Mattei, associate professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, recently published a book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, (University of Chicago Press) in which she argues that the fiscal and monetary austerity imposed on Great Britain after World War I to restore the […]
Mattei Misjudges Hawtrey
08 Jan 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, economic growth, economic history, fiscal policy, inflation targeting, international economics, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, politics - New Zealand
31 Dec 2023 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, business cycles, economic growth, economic history, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, labour economics, macroeconomics, Milton Friedman, monetarism, monetary economics, unemployment
Robert Solow (1924-2023) died last week. As a starting point for understanding his life and his work on growth theory, the Nobel prize website, since he won the award in 1987, includes an overall description, a biographical essay, and his Nobel lecture. I can also strongly recommend an interview that Steven Levitt carried out with…
Solow on Market Advantages and Market Failures
30 Dec 2023 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, economic history, fiscal policy, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment Tags: monetary policy
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, I thought it was time to call out all the Orwellian rewriting of intellectual history going on, so here goes: As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week: “So many economists were saying there’s no way for inflation to get back to normal without it entailing a […]
How Were So Many Economists So Wrong About the Recession?
29 Dec 2023 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, development economics, economic history, fiscal policy, growth disasters, macroeconomics, monetarism, monetary economics Tags: Argentina
Writing about the economic tragedy of Argentina, I’ve explained that one major problem is inflation, thanks to that country’s version of “modern monetary theory.” This is not a trivial problem. Here’s a chart, from a recent report by Reuters, showing how prices have been rising for nearly 10 years and skyrocketing for the past three […]
The Worst Journalism of 2023
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