“There’s something wrong with everything. In macro; not, you know, in life.” That may not be a verbatim quotation, but I remember Tyler explaining this in PhD macro I, and it has stuck with me. You don’t really understand a school of macroeconomic thought until you can dispassionately evaluate both its strengths and weaknesses. If [...]
Tags: Austrian business cycle theory, Austrian economics, Bachmann, Cowen, Hayek, Kling, Kydland and Prescott, Long and Plosser, macro, Mises, Selgin, Sumner, Tea Party
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“Manufactured crisis” is the term going around to describe the near-failure of Congress to raise the debt ceiling. Mitch McConnell says that we can expect more of them in the future. It’s not surprising that big-government types want to get rid of the debt ceiling altogether, but even some of the cool people are getting [...]
Tags: debt ceiling, executive power, McConnell, Ozimek, sovereign debt crisis, Sumner, War Powers Resolution
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Is there a word for serendipitous Wikipedia browsing? Yesterday I started out seeking information on punk music and I ended up discovering Bitcoin, an open source peer-to-peer digital currency. Bitcoin uses strong cryptography and decentralized computing to produce scarcity in the money supply, which grows at a predefined rate that is clearly visible in the source code. [...]
Tags: Bitcoin, Black, crypto-anarchism, cryptocurrency, Friedman, Future Imperfect, legal restrictions theory, Luther, monetary theory, Sumner, Wallace
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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 a post on moral hazard in the banking system, Megan McArdle writes, Nor do I find the central story of how the FDIC induced this moral hazard very compelling. Supposedly, ordinary depositors don’t bother to check the soundness of their banks because they don’t actually have skin in the game. Anyone making this argument [...]
Tags: banking, Cowen, deposit insurance, FDIC, Kroszner, McArdle, moral hazard, mutual fund banking, Sumner
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Scott Sumner has drawn a lot of attention for his peculiar view that monetary policy was tight in 2008, and that this tightness was the cause of the current recession and the recent financial crisis. I think his argument is at least somewhat persuasive; I don’t know if (or think that) it was the whole [...]
Tags: ABC, Lucas, macro, monetary, monetary confusion, Sumner
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