I promise not to do too many more posts about a) macro or b) Paul Krugman. I don’t just love macro, these are not my most popular posts, and Krugman is too shrill to read on a regular basis. Nevertheless, I think I can sort through some of the recent disagreement about liquidity traps. The [...]

Tags: Cowen, fiscal policy, Keynes, Keynesianism, Kling, Krugman, liquidity trap, monetary policy
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Everyone is interested in monetary policy and the Fed all of a sudden, so, what the hell, I’ll chime in too. Here is my ranking of monetary regimes: Depoliticization and denationalization of money. Free banking. The market selects a currency and banking is “regulated” in court under the common law of contract. The Fed is [...]

Tags: Cowen, Euro, Federal Reserve, Free Competition in Currency Act, monetary policy, optimal currency area, Paul, quantitative easing, Sumner, Tabarrok, Watts
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In 2008, the Keynesians emerged from hiding, where they had been since the mid-1980s. It was nice to see them, catch up, and so on. But now they won’t go away. This week’s Buttonwood column in The Economist considers whether fiscal austerity is expansionary or contractionary. A sentence caught my eye. Keynesian economists are also [...]

Tags: austerity, fiscal policy, Greece, ireland, monetary policy, Romer, spain
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Arnold Kling tentatively postulates that central banks can, at most, select between a low-stable inflation regime and a high-variable inflation regime. Bryan Caplan proposes a quick test, which I hereby supply. Below are some scatterplots of inflation variance versus inflation means for 176 countries. The data is from the World Bank, which gets it from [...]

Tags: Caplan, IMF, inflation, Kling, monetary policy, World Bank
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Wednesday will be an interesting day, and not just because of the introduction of the iPad. It is also likely to be the start of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s confirmation hearings for a second term. The final result no longer seems to be in doubt. Intrade now reports over a 90 percent probability of confirmation; [...]

Tags: Bernanke, Congress, elitism, Federal Reserve, fiscal policy, monetary policy, populism
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