Utopia, you are standing in it!

Along with Phil Magness, John Moore and Phil Vøn Schløsser, I assembled a series of concerns that we have regarding the measurement of income inequality in the US before 1945 as pictured by the Piketty-Saez U-Curve. We argue that the pronounced left-hand side of the U-Curve is sensitive to minor changes in assumptions as well as minor improvements in data quality. We argue that income inequality probably did fall and rise over the 20th century, but not in the proportions presented in the Piketty-Saez papers. The paper is available here on SSRN and the abstract is below:

In this article, we reconsider the level and trend of the income inequality series produced by Piketty and Saez (2003, 2015) for the United States using tax data for the period prior to 1945, which forms the left-side of a century-long distributional U-curve. We argue that there are reasons to doubt…

On Monday I wrote about the MPC membership of Caroline Saunders, whose four-year term had expired on 2 April 2023 and who appeared to be continuing to serve only at the day-to-day pleasure of the Minister of Finance. The Reserve Bank’s website on Monday said that her term had expired, and there was no statement from the Reserve Bank or from the Minister of Finance to the effect that she had either been reappointed or told to go away. That all seemed less than desirable (fact, and lack of transparency).

As I noted in that post, it all seemed rather odd. The election is approaching and the Minister of Finance had already last year reappointed one member, Peter Harris, to a term expiring in October. Under the conventions around elections, no new appointment could be made by the current government when the new term would start smack in the middle…

Over the last few days I’ve been reading a few pieces on UK monetary policy and high inflation. The first was a speech from the Deputy Governor responsible for economics and monetary policy, Ben Broadbent (over there senior central bankers actually give serious and thoughtful speeches on things the Bank has responsibility for), and the second was a new paper by long-term adviser, analyst and researcher Tim Congdon. There is a lot of overlap because Congdon’s paper is broader (“Why has inflation come back”) but his analytical approach has tended to emphasise the monetary aggregates, while Broadbent’s speech which is narrower in focus is specifically on the question of what information value for monetary policymakers there is (or isn’t) in the monetary aggregates over the longer term and in the specific context of the inflation of the last couple of years. Both are worth reading.

My own view on the…

It’s election year and the sniping between political parties has ramped up as expected.

While the big battalions of Labour and National have only exchanged long-range shots there’s plenty of activity among the minor players.

Unfortunately for them (but popcorn time for the rest of us), one of those smaller players – the Green Party – has chosen an election year to start a civil war within their own ranks.

Over at Kiwiblog, DPF has noticed what’s going on with one Elizabeth Kerekere at the forefront firing not just insults stupidly at one of the best politicians they have, Chloe Swabrick, but spraying fire across the party in general.

But it now appears to be about more than just sniping. It looks Kerekere has mates and they’re determined to take over the Green Party – and they’re Marxists.

And it’s not just the usual suspects like DPF pointing…

Decades ago I worked for a central bank in another country. I woke up one morning to learn that the Governor had been sacked, and by the time I got to work he was clearing his desk. He hadn’t done a bad job – and was one of the more inspiring people I ever worked for – but had fallen foul of the government (Minister of Finance and his colleagues/bosses). The law as it was meant that Governor could be removed whenever the government felt like it. for whatever reason the government felt like. It wasn’t a good model.

In the numerous attempts to capture just how independent various central banks are, one of the dimensions that usually appears is something around the dismissal provisions for key decisionmakers (in these days of committees and board, not just the Governor). Many older pieces of central banking legislation make it very hard…